What's new and changed in IBM Knowledge Catalog

IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 5.4.0

A new version of IBM® Knowledge Catalog was released in June 2026.

This release includes the following changes:

New features

This release of IBM Knowledge Catalog includes the following features:

Run multiple data quality rules with a single click

To run multiple data quality rules at once, you can now organize them in data quality rule groups.

For more information, see Managing data quality rule groups.

Import, enrich, and assess the quality of data from additional data sources

You can now import metadata from Microsoft Azure Fabric Warehouse data sources, enrich that data, and assess its quality.

For more information, see Supported connectors for discovery, enrichment, and data quality.

Query data assets and document libraries in natural languages other than English

The Text-to-SQL service now uses a multilingual embedding model so that you can create natural language queries in languages other than English. In upgraded deployments, you must reprocess existing metadata with the new model.

This feature is available with IBM Knowledge Catalog Premium.

For more information, see Updating projects and metadata with a new embedding model after upgrading.

Sync reference data sets to external databases

Reference data sets can now be synchronized to external databases and then consumed as regular governed data assets. With this enhancement, a reference data set can be profiled, queried via SQL, joined with other data sets, and reused consistently across the platform. This enables broader consumption of reference data for validation, standardization, analytics, and AI use cases.

For more information, see Synchronizing reference data sets to an external database.

Import and export reporting queries

You can now export your reporting queries in batch into a JSON file, and import JSON files with queries. Bulk import and export lets teams easily migrate, back up, and manage large collections of reporting queries across environments.

For more information, see Reporting queries.

Main menu improvements

You can now view and manage all artifacts grouped by type, and all categories by opening Governance > All artifacts from the main menu.

Control data and metadata access with the Access data preview permission

You can now assign the Access data preview permission to users and user groups across all projects, catalogs, and deployment spaces to have more control over who can view the actual data and address security requirements. Users without this permission can view asset metadata, but they are blocked from previewing actual data.

By default, the new permission is included in the following predefined roles:

• Administrator
• Business Analyst
• Data Engineer
• Data Scientist
• Data Steward
• Data Quality Analyst
• Developer
• User

If watsonx.ai and DataStage are deployed, the following tools and views are disabled for users and user groups without the permission:

Watsonx.ai

• AutoAI
• SPSS Modeler
• Jupyter
• Pipeline
• RStudio

DataStage

• Data previews (canvas)
• Data previews for data sets and file sets

Update role assignments and any custom roles that you have for users who need to preview asset data.

For more information, see Predefined roles and permissions in the IBM Software Hub documentation.

Browse asset hierarchies

You can now explore and manage connected, custom, and unstructured assets from the Hierarchies pane on the catalog Assets page. Information about relationships between available data sources, databases, schemas, tables, and columns in catalogs is available in one structured view. With these details, you can, for example, navigate relationships across multiple asset levels, view detailed information for assets at any level, or bulk select assets across levels to manage metadata more efficiently.

For more information, see Asset hierarchies.

Updates

The following updates were introduced in this release:

• Improved column names in business lineage

  When you view business lineage, the columns now have meaningful names instead of placeholder values like 1, 2, or 3.

• Data quality updates
  • You can now preview a subset of the rule output records when you test the rule. You don't have to define an output table.
  • You can now access the details of the applied data quality checks also from the data quality tab for a catalog asset.
• Term assignment updates
  • Rule-based artifact assignment

    You can now also set up rules and rule groups for how you want classifications to be assigned to data assets and columns. You can upload the rules to a project as a CSV file for consumption by the term assignment service.

  • Refine term assignment results with AI

    You can now enable LLM-based term review where a large language model selects the best-matching terms from the existing assignments and cleans up other assigned or suggested terms.

• Reporting updates
  • You can now share individual queries with user groups.
  • The reporting data model is now updated with multiple modified and newly added columns.
• Workflow updates
  • Workflows can now be accessed from Configurations and settings in the main menu.
  • The subheader of a request in task inbox now shows the status of the request.
  • When customizing a governance artifact workflow type, you can now use task form fields in the workflow template.
  • You can now export and import workflow configurations between two systems by using API.

Customer-reported issues fixed in this release

For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on the IBM Support website.