Alation 2021.1: Getting users to the data they need, faster

In the newest release, Alation 2021.1, Alation takes big steps to further accelerate onboarding and adoption, expanding the catalog to welcome more classes of users, and lowering their barrier to entry with more organized information. In 2021.1, Alation increases search relevancy with data domains, adds new data governance capabilities, and speeds up time-to-insight with an Open Connector Framework SDK.

Categorize data by domain

As a data consumer, sometimes you just want data in a single category. You don’t want to wade through irrelevant data from categories that don’t matter to you. With Alation 2021.1, users can now set up domains by department or category of their choice. That way, those in marketing have easy access to marketing data, while HR can find data on benefits. This accelerates adoption, and gives every user immediate, role-specific data.

Data domains provide three key benefits: more relevant search, intuitive browsing, and efficient curation.

Search powered by relevanceData domains let you organize data the way your organization thinks about data. For instance, you can create domains by “business area,” “use case,” “geography,” and more. Users, in turn, can easily narrow their search to quickly find and discover information that is most relevant to them.

Browse more intuitivelyBrowsing gives you a lay of your data landscape. You can see the kinds of data, domains, and subdomains available, and their hierarchy. Users can easily navigate to find precisely what they need. For example, you may need customer data for a particular region. Through browsing, you can easily go to the “customer” domain and navigate to the “region” subdomain, to find the relevant data.

Curate data more efficiently. Businesses can assign owners and stewards to specific domains where they can apply their expertise to the relevant data. This enables stewards to focus their efforts within a domain, resulting in faster curation and clear ownership of domains and underlying data.

Meet Governance Objectives with Enhancements in Lineage and Profiling

Data quality is essential to data governance. But questions about quality often arise from lack of context. Data consumers must ask, “where did this data come from?” and, “how do I know I can trust this asset?”

In this release, we answer these vital questions with new governance capabilities, which offer richer lineage and profiling in real-time. Automated impact analysis lets data engineers and architects easily visualize downstream impact from a particular change in a data object. The upstream lineage audit report provides insights into potential upstream anomalies in data.

Connect to Virtually Anything and Accelerate Time to Insight

In 2021.1, Alation becomes more open with the addition of the Open Connector Framework SDK. The Open Connector Framework SDK enables your organization to easily create connectors for virtually any system not already supported by Alation. This means that all the data you need can be made easily available in Alation. To better understand how Alation helps you connect to additional data sources, and what that means for customers and partners, read this blog with Junaid Saiyed, our SVP of Engineering.