# Populating the AWS Glue Data Catalog
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You can populate the AWS Glue Data Catalog using the following methods:
+ AWS Glue crawler – An AWS Glue crawler can automatically discover and catalog data sources like databases, data lakes, and streaming data. The crawlers are the most common and recommended method to populate the Data Catalog as they can automatically discover and infer metadata for a wide variety of data sources.
+  Manually adding metadata – You can manually define databases, tables, and connection details and add them to the Data Catalog using the AWS Glue console, Lake Formation console, AWS CLI, or AWS Glue APIs. Manual entry is useful when you want to catalog data sources that cannot be crawled. 
+ Integrating with other AWS services – You can populate the Data Catalog with metadata from services like AWS Lake Formation and Amazon Athena. These services can discover and register data sources in the Data Catalog. 
+  Populating from an existing metadata repository – If you have an existing metadata store like Apache Hive Metastore, you can use AWS Glue to import that metadata into the Data Catalog. For more information, see [Migration between the Hive Metastore and the AWS Glue Data Catalog](https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-glue-samples/tree/master/utilities/Hive_metastore_migration) on GitHub.

**Topics**
+ [Using crawlers to populate the Data Catalog](add-crawler.md)
+ [Defining metadata manually](populate-dg-manual.md)
+ [Integrating with Amazon S3 Tables](glue-federation-s3tables.md)
+ [Integrating with other AWS services](populate-dc-other-services.md)
+ [Data Catalog settings](console-data-catalog-settings.md)