Documentation best practices

Use cases for using Secoda to automate repetitive documentation tasks, saving time for your data team.

By leveraging Secoda, data teams can automate manual and repetitive tasks which would improve these processes in terms of efficiency. This page provides some common solutions for leveraging Secoda's features to save time.

Note: When making edits to descriptions in Secoda, ensure that you have the integration's permissions set so that descriptions made in Secoda persist.

Automate enrichment within Secoda

AI Description Editor

• Our AI Assistant can be utilized in many ways, and we find it extremely powerful when it comes to documentation.

• The Assistant reads the metadata in your workspace and can generate descriptions of your resources with just one click. This can be done on the Catalog resources, Dictionary metrics and Collections.

Automations

• Define rules once for updating documentation, and have these automatically updated on a set cadence

• Automations can make updates to tags, descriptions, owners as well as help organize your workspace by moving resources to specific Teams or Collections, for example

Bulk Editing Metadata

• Use our bulk editing feature to make bulk metadata edits to your resources with a drag down shortcut similar to Excel's

Importing metadata into Secoda

• Create a CSV to bulk import metadata for resources already existing in Secoda. For example, if you have descriptions for your Oracle assets living in a G-sheet, you can upload these onto your existing resources in Secoda.

Propagating Metadata

• You might find that a lot of your data resources are related, and it can become redundant having to manually update resources that should have the same tags and owners, for example.

• Our propagate metadata feature allows you to bulk edit these related resources!

• End result:

  • Reduced time spent on documentation

  • Improved documentation and data literacy

PII Identifier

• The PII Identifier automatically flags potential PII data assets across your workspace by searching for keywords.

• You can even customize the list of keywords depending on how your organization defines personal information.

Slack AI Assistant

• With the Slack integration, you have the ability to ask the AI Assistant questions in Slack, get a response, and then automatically push those answers into your workspace.

• This means less redundancy with answering questions and additional documentation in the product.

Secoda API

• Use Secoda’s APIs to bulk edit the name, descriptions, and tags on your resources.

• Automatic PII detection through the API can identify resources that need to be more governed for auditing purposes

  • PII can be tagged, and automatic reporting for audits can be generated

Identify what needs to be documented

If you'd like to identify which resources have not been documented yet, you can do so by following these steps to Search within the Catalog.

If you'd like to be notified of changes that may result in a need for updated documentation, you can subscribe to schema change notifications for those particular resources. Set those up hereManage notifications in Secoda.

Try out our ROI Calculator to estimate how much money your team could save by automating tasks with Secoda.