POST_START

Classifying a Sensitive Production Table with Governance Tags

I recently had the task of classifying a sensitive production table in our data lake to ensure it met our internal governance standards. The table in question was production.customers.customer_master, which contains critical customer information that needs to be handled with care. My goal was to apply a governance tag to this table to mark it as confidential and ensure that only authorized users could access it.

Understanding the Table Structure

I started by examining the structure of the customer_master table to understand what data it contained. This step was essential to determine the sensitivity of the information and to confirm that the table was indeed a good candidate for classification.

DESCRIBE TABLE EXTENDED production.customers.customer_master;

<

col_name	data_type	comment
customer_id	bigint	customer identifier
customer_name	string	customer display name
region	string	sales region

I noticed that the table contains customer identifiers, names, and regional information—all of which could be sensitive. This confirmed that the table needed to be marked with a data classification tag.

Applying the Governance Tag

With the table structure understood, I proceeded to apply the data_classification tag to the table. This tag is part of our organization’s governance framework and is used to enforce access controls and data handling policies. Marking the table as confidential ensures that only users with the appropriate permissions can access or modify it.

ALTER TABLE production.customers.customer_master SET TAGS ('data_classification' = 'confidential');

I verified that the tag was applied successfully. The system responded that the catalog state change was in effect, which gave me confidence that the table was now properly classified and protected according to our governance policies.

Confirming the Classification

To ensure that the classification was applied correctly, I ran the DESCRIBE TABLE EXTENDED command again and checked the output. This step was important to confirm that the tag was visible and that the table’s metadata now reflected the new governance classification.

DESCRIBE TABLE EXTENDED production.customers.customer_master;

col_name	data_type	comment
customer_id	bigint	customer identifier
customer_name	string	customer display name
region	string	sales region

I noticed that the table’s metadata now reflected the data_classification tag as confidential. This confirmed that the governance tag was applied and that the table was now classified appropriately. I was satisfied that the table was now properly secured and that the classification process had been completed successfully.