Microsoft Purview Data Map

Microsoft Purview Data Map (formerly Azure Purview) is the data governance side of the Purview brand. While Microsoft Purview compliance covers Microsoft 365 content (sensitivity labels, retention, eDiscovery), Data Map covers the broader data estate — Azure SQL, Synapse, AWS S3, Snowflake, on-premises SQL Server, file shares, Oracle, SAP, Power BI semantic models, and many more sources.

What Data Map does

The Data Map is a central catalogue that:

• Discovers data sources via scheduled scans.
• Classifies content using Microsoft's sensitive information types (SSN, credit card, custom) and custom classifications.
• Maps lineage — how data flows between systems (which Power BI report consumes which Synapse table that comes from which Data Factory pipeline).
• Catalogues business glossary terms and ties them to physical assets.
• Surfaces ownership — who's the steward of each data asset.
• Enables search across the data estate.

A data analyst searching for "customer revenue" finds the relevant Power BI report, plus the underlying tables, plus the lineage upstream to source systems — all with proper sensitivity classification and ownership.

How it relates to Purview compliance

The two are complementary but distinct:

• Purview compliance = "what's in my Microsoft 365 content, and how do I govern it?"
• Purview Data Map = "what data assets exist across my whole enterprise, and how are they classified and connected?"

A unified Purview portal at purview.microsoft.com surfaces both. Some signals cross over — sensitivity classifications discovered by Data Map can inform DLP and labelling decisions in Microsoft 365.

Connectors

Data Map ships connectors for most major data sources:

• Azure — Data Lake, Blob, SQL, Synapse, Cosmos DB, Data Factory, Databricks.
• Other clouds — AWS S3, AWS Redshift, GCP BigQuery, GCP Cloud Storage.
• Databases — SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Teradata, SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA.
• SaaS / BI — Salesforce, ServiceNow, Power BI, Tableau.
• File systems — Azure Files, on-prem file shares (via self-hosted integration runtime).

Each scan inventories, classifies, and links lineage where possible.

When Data Map is the right tool

Data Map is most valuable for organisations with:

• A serious data estate — multiple databases, BI tools, lakes, warehouses.
• Data governance ambitions — knowing what data exists is the precondition for governing it.
• Compliance requirements — regulators wanting to see classification of sensitive data across the enterprise.
• Data democratisation goals — letting analysts find and reuse data without rebuilding things from scratch.

For smaller organisations whose data lives mostly in Microsoft 365 (SharePoint and OneDrive), Microsoft 365-side Purview compliance is usually enough; Data Map is overkill.

Pricing model

Data Map is licensed by scanned capacity units — pay for the volume of data being scanned and the frequency of scans. Costs scale with the size and breadth of the data estate.

For organisations with mature data engineering / data platforms teams, Data Map is increasingly the catalogue of choice. For Microsoft 365-only customers, it's a "future state" rather than a today problem.