For everyone

Ask: search and questions

One box for searching and for asking questions in plain words.

The front of Ask

Ask is the first screen you see when you open KRISID. It is also Ask at the top of the sidebar. The heading reads What are you looking for? and the cursor is already in the box.

Try offers up to five questions you can click. Some are written by whoever runs your repository. The rest are made from your own repository, and a question only appears here if it has an answer.
Wildcards under the Try row is three you can press: * for every asset, cust% for a name or key that starts with something, %_id for one that ends with something. See What Ask understands.
Browse by Data Domain has one card per domain. Each card shows how many assets are in the domain and its three biggest kinds, such as "9 business terms · 6 business rules". Press a card to list everything in that domain.
Browse by type shows the four biggest types in each group. The Show all link beside the heading shows every type. Press a type to open its list. See Browsing by domain and by type.
Recently viewed shows the last eight things you opened. The list is kept per person, so it follows you to another computer.
Saved searches lists every saved search and how many conditions each one has. See Lists, conditions and saved searches.

Your repository may use different names for these groupings. The words come from its metamodel.

Tip: Press / from any screen to jump to the Ask box.

Search or ask

You do not choose between searching and asking. Type what you want and Ask works out which it is.

A search such as customer looks at names, definitions, harvested comments, tags and the glossary. It also reads what surrounds an asset, such as the schema a table sits in, the domain that owns it and the term that defines it. So a table can come back because of what holds it.
A question such as who owns Customer 360 gets an answer at the top of the results, above the list.
When the glossary says that a word you typed means something else, also searched for names the term it used.
Two wildcards are read wherever they appear: * is every asset in the repository, and % matches a shape of name or key — cust%, %mer, %cust%. The Wildcards line under the box on the front of Ask is three of them you can press. A * on its own is meant to be narrowed afterwards, with a kind, a domain or a condition.

For every kind of question Ask can read, see What Ask understands. To ask for a number, such as "net revenue by region last quarter", see Metrics and asking for a number.

Read the answer sentence

Above the results, Ask says in one sentence how it read what you typed. For example: Showing Tables ✕ in Banking & Financial Services ✕ marked Contains PII ✕ · 2 results.

Press ✕ on any part to remove only that part. The results update straight away.
Press just the words instead to drop the whole reading and search for your words as typed. Press read it as a question to go back.
A domain after in, within, inside, under or across narrows the results to everything in that domain. A domain's name on its own, such as customer, is searched for as a word.

Narrow the results

The rail on the left is headed Narrow to. It counts everything that matched, not only what is on screen.

Press a kind, such as Tables, to show only that kind. Press Everything to see all kinds again.
Under In Data Domain, press a domain to show only what is in it. Press it again to remove it.

What you pick on the rail joins the answer sentence with its own ✕. It stays in place while you keep typing, so you do not lose a list you are building.

Read the results

Best match appears when one result is clearly the answer: it has the exact name you typed, it is the only result, or it scores well ahead of the rest. The card shows its definition, its domain and up to four linked facts, with Open and Lineage buttons.
Also called lists other assets with the same name and the domain each one is in. Use it to tell two assets called Customer apart.
The results are grouped by kind. Business meaning comes first when it ranks first. Physical assets, such as tables and columns, are shown as compact tiles with their path. Each group shows its count, with a link to the rest when there are more.
Each result shows its type, its domain, its status, any sensitivity marks and what it holds, such as "22 columns". Missing in Source means the last harvest did not find it.
Results marked demo data are examples, not assets harvested from a real source. They are always listed after real results.

If Ask cannot find all of your words, it says so. It then shows results that have some of the words, or the closest spelling.

When nothing matches exactly

A question can have no exact answer. For example, "tables with PII in Banking" finds no table that is itself marked Contains PII, because PII is recorded on columns. Ask does not stop at an empty page. It says what it found instead:

the tables that hold columns with that mark, with the column names
the same question asked of the kinds that do have the mark, such as the columns in Banking marked Contains PII
the question with each condition removed, such as all tables in Banking

Each suggestion shows how many results it returns. Press one to apply it.

Start a new search

Each of these empties the box and returns you to the front of Ask. Nothing from the last search is kept:

Press New search beside the box.
Press Esc in the box, or delete everything in it.
Press Ask in the sidebar when you are already on Ask.

If you open an asset from the results, Ask in the sidebar takes you back to your search as you left it.

Add a condition

To narrow an answer by an attribute, a responsibility or a link, press + add a condition under the answer sentence. A search with conditions becomes a list, and you can save it. See Lists, conditions and saved searches.

Good to know

While conditions are on, Ask shows a list and no answer card. An answer worked out from part of the repository could be wrong.
The address in your browser holds your search. Copy it to send someone the same results.
Just after a big harvest or load, Ask can be a few minutes behind. Nothing is wrong — what Ask reads is built in the background, a little at a time, so that cataloguing thousands of things does not make the rest of the product slow. See below.

Something was just catalogued and Ask cannot find it

Ask does not read your assets directly. It reads a layer built from them — the words on a thing, the words on what contains it, who is responsible for it — and that layer is built in the background rather than at the moment you save. So there is a gap, and it is short:

A handful of changes are picked up within a few seconds.
A big harvest or workbook load is worked through at about a hundred assets a second once there is a backlog. A hundred thousand new assets is a quarter of an hour; six hundred thousand is under two hours.

Two things to expect while it catches up:

Something not yet built does not appear at all, rather than appearing wrongly. Counts are worked out the same way, so a total can be low for the same few minutes.
Something renamed can still be found by its old name until its turn comes. Rename a schema and its tables and columns carry the old words for as long as the queue takes, because rebuilding every one of them inside your rename would make saving the rename feel broken.

If something is still missing well after a load has finished — the next morning, say — that is not this. Tell whoever runs the repository: an administrator can see how much of the layer is built, and rebuild it deliberately, which takes under an hour even on a very large repository.