FDNY Governs 30 Years of Mission-Critical Data on OpenMetadata

The Fire Department of New York runs on a 30-year-old Oracle database that sits behind every dispatch decision, duty status check, and medical leave record, built and extended over three decades but never fully governed. Its institutional knowledge lived in individual memories and Excel spreadsheets, and every analytics request went through a small development team with a two-to-three-week lead time.

Learn how FDNY, the largest fire department in the United States, turned decades of siloed Oracle data into a living, AI-ready semantic layer with OpenMetadata, then connected it to Claude so business users can explore the data in plain English without writing SQL. Inside this case study:

• How FDNY documented a 30-year Oracle database without a data engineering team, using OpenMetadata with an Obsidian and OpenCode workflow that writes governed descriptions back to the catalog
• How the team connected Claude to OpenMetadata over MCP, turning multi-week, developer-gated analytics requests into self-service answers in plain English with no SQL
• How a self-hosted, on-premise deployment kept operationally sensitive personnel data inside FDNY's environment while making it discoverable and trusted