Embodiments of the present invention provide a metadata querying method and apparatus. The method includes: sampling at least one piece of first metadata from to-be-searched-for metadata; using at least a part of feature values in each piece of the sampled first metadata as an index, and searching a sparse index table preset in a memory for a corresponding container identifier; selecting, according to the number of times that a same container identifier is found, a container corresponding to a container identifier that meets a set condition; loading metadata in the selected container into a metadata cache; and searching the metadata cache for a data block that is the same as the to-be-searched-for metadata. In the embodiments of the present invention, querying performance can be improved and occupied memory space can be reduced.