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ADR-009 Do not store source data

Status

✅ Accepted

Context

Some catalogue products offer a feature which allows a user to view a sample of data, and during user research a small number of users have noted that data previews would be useful.

Analysis

Advantages

  • A user can get a better sense of what a dataset contains if they can preview or download some data directly from a catalogue

Disdvantages

  • This creates a “shadow copy” of data outside of whatever governance requirements are places upon it, for example retention
  • This potentially bypasses any access control rules in place for data
  • Storing data substantially increases the risk surface area for the catalogue
  • This creates an additional burden on already legnthy metadata ingestion to fetch and refresh data

Decision

We will not store data in the catalogue for preview or other purposes. The catalogue will only contain metadata.

This page was last reviewed on 16 July 2025. It needs to be reviewed again on 16 July 2026 by the page owner #find-moj-data .