Show HN: Marmot – Single-binary data catalog (no Kafka, no Elasticsearch)
3 comments
·December 2, 2025paddy_m
When should you reach for a data catalog via a data warehouse or data lake? If you are choosing a data catalog this is probably obvious to you, if you just happened on this HN post less so.
Also, what key decisions do other data catalogs make via your choices? What led to those decisions and what is the benefit to users?
charlie-haley
It depends on your ecosystem. If everything lives under one vendor their native catalog will probably work really well for you. But most of the time (especially for older orgs) there's usually a huge fragmented ecosystem of data assets that aren't easily discoverable and spread across multiple teams and vendors.
I like to think of Marmot as more of "operational" catalog with more of a focus on usability for individual contributors and not just data engineers. The key focus being on simplicity, in terms of both deployments and usability.
Hey HN, I wanted to show off my project Marmot! I decided to build Marmot after discovering a lot of data catalogs can be complex and require many external dependencies such as Kafka, Elasticsearch or an external orchestrator like Airflow.
Marmot is a single Go binary backed by Postgres. That's it!
It already supports: Full-text search across tables, topics, queues, buckets, APIs Glossary and asset to term associations
Flexible API so it can support almost any data asset!
Terraform/Pulumi/CLI for managing a catalog-as-code
10+ Plugins (and growing)
Live demo: https://demo.marmotdata.io