Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

To get the enhanced connector for Universal BI, contact the Forward Deployed Engineering team at Alation.

The enhanced Universal BI OCF Connector simplifies loading metadata from BI sources into Alation, overcoming challenges like networking blocks and rigid file formats. It offers flexible integration via CSV files from external systems or cloud storage, providing a secure, efficient solution for managing complex data environments.

The Universal BI OCF provides a powerful solution for easily generating BI data sources in Alation by reading metadata from CSV files. Administrators have full control over how the file’s columns are managed directly in Alation’s user-friendly interface, using familiar OCF settings.

With the Universal BI OCF, you can capture key technical metadata, including:

• BI Source name

• Folders

• Reports

• Fields

Team

The following administrators are required to install this connector:

• BI Admin:

  • Provides the Universal BI CSV file post extraction

• Alation Server Admin:

  • Installs the connector

  • Creates a Universal BI source

  • Configures the Universal BI source

Scope

The table below describes which metadata objects are extracted by this connector and which operations are supported.

Feature	Scope	Availability
Metadata extraction	Extract the metadata in Object Mapping	Yes
Report Lineage	Intra-system lineage	Yes
Cross System Lineage	End-to-end lineage at the system level from the RDBMS data source to the BI data source	Manual
Colum Level Lineage	Column level lineage refers to the ability to trace columns across data sources in the “Lineage” tab for a catalogued object	Manual
Object Usage Statistics	Popularity on Answer and Liveboard	No
Permission Mirroring	Replicate permissions into Alation	No
Report/Dashboard Previews	Image Previews or Report thumbnails stored in Thoughtspot	No
Link to Source System	Navigation	No
Selective Extraction	Ability to apply filters on Organization	No
Full Extraction	Ability to run full extraction on the CSV instance	Yes

Object Mapping

The diagram and table below describe which metadata objects are extracted by this connector and how they are mapped to objects in Alation.