A large company has several databases across its many departments. What kind of metadata describes how many locations contain a certain piece of data?

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Structural metadata describes how data is organized and connected across systems. When a company has data pieces spread across many databases, understanding where those pieces live and how they relate to one another across the entire data landscape is about the data’s structure—how it's distributed, linked, and arranged. That organizational view is what structural metadata captures, enabling you to see which locations contain which data and how those locations fit together in the overall architecture.

Administrative metadata covers management details like ownership, access rights, and retention policies. Descriptive metadata focuses on identifying information such as titles and keywords to help users discover data. Statistical metadata deals with numerical properties of the data, like counts, distributions, and quality metrics, rather than where data is stored. Because this question is about mapping the distribution and relationships of data across multiple locations, structural metadata is the best fit.