What exactly is metadata? How is metadata different than regular data? As I understand, metadata is data about data- so I think of analytics; is my simple definition correct? How is metadata different than data?  I'm simply asking to broaden my understanding-thanks!
Metadata is data that describes your data.  For example "Kenneth" is my name.  It would be stored in a column called FirstName (for example).  The metadata would be things like


Variable length string with a max length of 50
First name of the user
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Analytics is more


How many Kenneth's are there in the data.
What is the average number of questions by someone with the first name of Kenneth.