Alation 2020.4 Delivers New Data Governance Capabilities and Enhanced User Experience

Redwood City, Calif. – December 8, 2020 – Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced Alation 2020.4, the latest release of its flagship enterprise data catalog. The release supports Alation’s market-leading effort to evolve the data catalog into a platform for data intelligence and drive data culture broadly throughout organizations.

As part of Alation’s ongoing commitment to enhancing support for data governance use cases, driving data culture, and increasing analyst productivity, Alation 2020.4 adds:

• New data governance capabilities. The platform now includes data profiling that allows users to identify and correct data quality issues before data is consumed by users or built into machine-learning (ML) models; richer lineage APIs that allow for programmatic impact analysis; and new, table-level privacy options that, at a more granular level, prevent inadvertent exposure to sensitive data.

• Enhanced user experience. The platform’s consumer-grade interface includes core search improvements that help users pinpoint information faster; new search capabilities that broaden the scope of what can be searched from within Alation now including BI dimensions and measures; and universal branding on all catalog pages that increases familiarity and matches corporate initiative branding.

• Updates to intelligent SQL editor. Updates to Compose, Alation’s intelligent SQL editor, includes new single sign-on to Azure Databricks that enables data scientists to more quickly and securely sign on and run queries against Azure Databricks; and enhanced analytics that now show the most popular queries run through Compose, offering a simple way to prioritize queries that should be optimized or promoted across the enterprise.

“In 2020 we significantly dialed up our data governance efforts at Alation,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder, Alation. “Data governance remains a strategic use case in the evolution of transforming the data catalog into a platform for data intelligence solutions.”

Alation 2020.4 also includes lineage UX enhancements that allow for greater customizability and full-screen visualization; lexicon UX updates that simplify the process of confirming and rejecting auto-suggested business terms; and new certified connectors including Dataiku, ServiceNow, and the latest release of Databricks. Alation 2020.4 was released into general availability on November 20, 2020.