ELT Connectors

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

This section contains topics that explain how to install and configure ELT connectors.

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Overview

ELT OCF connectors provide efficient data loading and transformation.

Alation offers the following ELT OCF connectors:

  • OCF Connector for dbt:

    • Add-on connector for dbt

    • dbt Gen2 OCF connector (standalone connector)

  • Fivetran OCF connector

OCF Connector for dbt

Alation offers OCF connector for dbt as an add-on connector and a standalone connector called dbt Gen2 OCF connector.

Add-on Connector for dbt: The dbt add-on connector helps establish lineage and also fetch the description and additional metadata depending on the type of primary connector you use. On the other hand, the dbt Gen2 OCF Connector (Beta) provides all the capabilities that the add-on connector for dbt offers and additionally provides maximum visibility at the column level, allowing you to understand the various transformations and changes that the data undergoes through the data pipeline. This transparency will enable you to understand and troubleshoot issues, if any, with the jobs responsible for generating cataloged objects, downstream lineage, and pipelines.

Add-on Connector Vs. dbt Gen2 OCF Connector (Beta)

Following are some of the key feature differences between the add-on connector for dbt and dbt Gen2 OCF connector.

Add-On Connector for dbt

dbt Gen2 OCF Connector (Beta)

Works only with the supported primary connectors and shares the user interface of primary connectors.

Provides an exclusive user interface for configuring the connector settings. Configure once and use the connector.

Supports dbt core and dbt cloud

Supports only dbt cloud

Extracts table, view and column descriptions

Supports Metadata Extraction of projects, models, columns, tests, jobs, and metrics.

No support for filter extraction.

Supports Filter Extraction. You can create a filter to select a list of projects to use during MDE and lineage extraction

Supports lineage extraction. No support to view the health of a dbt model

Supports lineage extraction and provides an exclusive UI to configure lineage. You can view the health of models with associated Data Health rules based on the test results of associated objects (RDBMS tables) manifested by dbt. Any failure in model execution gets propagated to downstream objects in the lineage graph making it easy to find the root cause of the failure.

No support to view job runs for an extraction.

Provides details of job runs for an extraction. For a given project or model, the Job Runs table displays the latest job execution summary for an environment.

Fivetran OCF Connector

Fivetran OCF provides end-to-end lineage between source and target for loading and transformation. <<However, lineage for data transformation is performed using the dbt connector.>>