Overview
Kinetica provides metadata tables, or virtual catalogs, as a means of querying the database for information about its objects, relationships, and permissions.
Virtual catalogs can be used to easily search for database tables & views by name without knowing the containing schema name, or for database columns by name without knowing the containing table or view name. They can be used to generate reports of the database structure or audit the creation & modification of that structure.
Kinetica provides its own set of virtual catalog tables, and supports both ANSI & PostgreSQL metadata queries.
The information returned when querying the virtual catalogs is automatically filtered by the permissions of the querying user. For instance, regular users will only see the tables & views to which they have access when querying a virtual catalog table that lists all of the tables in the database, while system administrators will see all tables & views.
