Most data governance advice assumes a governance office, a council, and a budget. A three-person team running SQL Server has none of those. It has a database, a few hundred tables, some Power BI reports, and people who ask whether the numbers are right.
That team needs the smallest set of habits that makes the answer checkable.
The five things
| What | Why | How small it can be |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog | People can’t trust a column they can’t interpret | One sentence per table and per column people actually use |
| Critical Data Elements | Not every column deserves the same attention | Dozens of columns, not hundreds |
| Tests | A rule nobody runs isn’t governance | Generated from data profiling, plus the business rules you know |
| Quality score | Leaders ask “can I trust it?”, not “which tests failed?” | One score per data set, with a CDE score beside it |
| Owners | Someone has to decide what correct means | One business owner and one data team contact per data set |
Leave out the rest until a real problem asks for it: glossaries, stewardship councils, policy documents, maturity assessments.
How DataOps TestGen covers it
TestGen is a data quality tool, not a governance platform. These five pieces fall out of work it already does on your SQL Server tables.
Catalog from the data profiling run
After data profiling, TestGen’s Data Catalog shows every table and column with its statistics. You add a description for each and tag it in nine categories, including Source System, Business Domain, Data Product, and Stakeholder Group. Tags set on a table group are inherited by its tables. It exports to Excel, or to a metadata CSV you can edit in bulk and import back.
Critical Data Elements and PII
Data profiling can flag likely PII columns and, through a table group setting that is on by default, likely Critical Data Elements. Review the suggestions, then set the flag to Yes, No, or Inherit by hand, in bulk, or by CSV. PII-flagged values are masked for users without PII access.
Tests
Test generation picks from 34 test types and sets thresholds from the profile. Add the rules only you know, such as “ship date is on or after order date”, with business-rule or custom SQL tests. The no-T-SQL answer walks through it.
A score people can read
TestGen’s quality scores combine data profiling and test results, refresh after every run, and break down by accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, uniqueness, and validity, or by business domain and data classification. A scorecard can show a total score and a CDE score side by side. In TestGen’s color scale, 96% and above is green and below 86% is red. For putting those scores in front of Power BI users, see the SQL Server and Power BI dashboards answer.
Owners and alerts
TestGen has no separate owner field. Use the Stakeholder Group tag for the people responsible, and set notifications so failures reach them.
What it costs
Open-source TestGen is free for one user, one connection, and one project. A three-person team with one SQL Server connection on Enterprise pays $400 a month: $100 per user plus $100 per connection. Enterprise adds per-project roles, so business owners can read scores without changing tests.
Start at the SQL Server install page.