Microsoft Purview

Overview

Microsoft Purview is a brand spanning three solution families rather than one product, and getting that straight matters more than any feature comparison.

Data governance is just two solutions, the Data Map and the Unified Catalog. Data security and data compliance are separate families with separate licensing, sold through Microsoft 365 rather than Azure.

So when someone says they have Purview, ask which family. The governance part is Azure pay-as-you-go and needs a subscription; the compliance part arrives with an E5 licence.

Everything in the governance family is metadata, not data. Microsoft states plainly that no permission in the Data Map or Unified Catalog grants access to the underlying data.

The naming has moved twice. Azure Purview is dead as a brand, and inside the portal Data Catalog was renamed Unified Catalog, a change Microsoft still tracks region by region.

Billing changed on 6 January 2025 to pay as you go, metered on governed assets per day and processing units. Older pricing descriptions are wrong, and the legacy catalogue and its old meters still exist for customers who did not consent.

Governed asset has a specific meaning worth knowing, because it is much cheaper than it sounds: only assets attached to a governance concept count. Microsoft's own example bills 20 of 200 tables.

Read this limitation before designing around it: Unified Catalog access policies are not technically enforced. Approvers provision access by hand, and attestations are attested by the consumer rather than enforced.

Separately there is an enforced policy mechanism, but it is preview, narrowly scoped to a handful of Azure sources, and now filed under legacy documentation, so do not conflate the two.

Its real strength is reach into the Microsoft estate, covering Fabric, Power BI, OneLake, Dataverse and Azure databases with a live view for Fabric, plus a genuinely federated governance model of domains and stewards.

Key features and capabilities

The same headings are used for every governance & stewardship entry, so two tools can be read side by side.

What it catalogues

• The Data Map scans sources for technical metadata; the Unified Catalog is the curation layer on top
• Coverage spans Azure services, third-party databases, Amazon S3 and HDFS files, and applications
• Third-party sources include Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Oracle, SAP, Teradata, Salesforce and MongoDB
• Scan depth is tiered, from basic metadata through schema to schema plus classification
• Sampling is published, at the top 128 rows or first megabyte for structured data; Delta format is unsupported

Ownership and stewardship

• Governance domains are the container that gives assets context and establishes accountability
• Data products group tables, files and reports around a defined use case, discoverable across domains
• Published roles cover a governance administrator, domain owners, data product owners, stewards and readers
• Critical data elements describe key business data, and data products tie to objectives and health controls
• Discovery is the catalogue itself plus a request access button, rather than a separate marketplace product

Glossary, policy and classification

• Glossary terms carry policies, which are inherited and aggregated onto data products
• Automatic classification during scanning, with system and custom rules, plus a metered on-demand option
• Sensitivity labels can be applied to Data Map assets in preview, for a subset of sources
• Unified Catalog access policies are not enforced; approvers grant access to assets manually
• A separate enforced policy mechanism exists but is preview, narrowly scoped, and documented as legacy

Lineage and impact

• Lineage is captured source by source and from pipeline integration rather than universally
• Published lineage sources include Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks, Snowflake, Power BI, Fabric and SAP
• Many sources show lineage only when used as a source or sink in a Data Factory or Synapse pipeline
• Column-level lineage is not published as a general guarantee
• Impact analysis arrives through data observability, currently in preview

Workflow and collaboration

• Tiered sequential approval, from the requester's manager through compliance review to access approvers
• Any single denial ends the chain, and approved is a distinct state from completed
• A reworked approvals experience shipped in November 2025
• Attestations and terms of use appear on the request form for the consumer to accept
• Access management can be disabled per data product if you use an external access tool

Integrations

• Source connectors spanning AWS, Google, SAP, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks, Salesforce, Qlik and Tableau
• Analytics in OneLake exports catalogue data into Microsoft Fabric for reporting on governance itself
• Security Copilot assists natural-language search across the catalogue
• A self-hosted integration runtime reaches on-premises and network-isolated sources
• A public API for the Unified Catalog is not published

Where it runs and what it costs

• Software as a service on a single-tenant model, through the Purview portal
• The Unified Catalog is generally available in 24 regions, with two more still to be confirmed
• No sovereign or government region is listed for the Unified Catalog, though the Data Map scanner covers more
• Priced per governed asset per day plus processing units
• A free tier exists with an upgrade path, though its limits are not published

Pricing

Usage-based$0.0165 per governed asset a day

Governance is metered two ways in East US: $0.0165 per governed asset per day, and processing units at $15 basic, $60 standard or $240 advanced, one unit being an hour of managed compute. Only assets attached to a governance concept count, so Microsoft's own example bills 20 of 200 tables, and empty domains cost nothing. Published guidance puts a simple quality rule over a million rows at about 0.02 units. Security and compliance features come with Microsoft 365 licences, with several additionally metered. Free-tier limits are not published.

Vendor pricing page →

Demos and videos

• What is the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog? Product demo · YouTube
• Improve trust with data quality and health management Tutorial · YouTube

About Microsoft

Microsoft Purview is a first-party Microsoft product family, so no separate company, funding history or ownership applies. Governance is bought as Azure pay-as-you-go and needs an Azure subscription and resource group in the same tenant; the security and compliance families are licensed through Microsoft 365 plans, and Microsoft defers the exact mapping of solutions to E3, E5 and compliance add-ons to its licence comparison tables rather than publishing a matrix. No Purview-specific customer count is published. Microsoft publishes its own internal adoption of the Unified Catalog as a case study.

microsoft.com