Alation offers enterprise data intelligence solutions, including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation operates in thethe data catalog market. With its Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight with the goal of tackle the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management.
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DBeaver
Score 8.5 out of 10
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DBeaver offers comprehensive data management tools designed to help teams explore, process, and administrate SQL, NoSQL, and cloud data sources. DBeaver is available commercially as DBeaver PRO and for free as DBeaver Community.
Alation is well suited to helping a user find a column or even a query using a business term search. In this regard Alation is excellent because it's easy to not only associate these items with each other, but there are also many ways to link the column and/or query to that business term/concept
If you are connecting to Snowflake and want to query from your laptop, I find that this is much easier to use than Snowflake's IDE. It allows us as a business intelligence team to more easily connect to our servers, and code with much less hassle. It would be less appropriate if you are only on an on-premises SQL server, in that case, I would just use SSMS.
Ability to link objects using the @ symbol. It allows us to easily provide a way to get more information or context. So if the business concept is part of a hierarchy, we can link to the other terms in that hierarchy.
The customization is really helpful. Most object types have robust customization options. Others are less so, but it is improving. We've created multiple custom fields to support our data governance framework.
The search feature with filtering is helpful in narrowing down what you're looking for.
The lineage UI is not ready for primetime. I would not recommend this feature for my users at this time because it's too complex to understand and is visually difficult to track down specific paths.
The underlying infrastructure of the on-premise version of the software is fragile and unnecessarily complicated, using too many modules and technologies.
The license model of the on-premise version contains too many add-ons. I would like to pay one price and get all of the features.
Schema editing is not very intuitive. Editing a single column forces you into multiple tab windows when trying to change something simple like a column name.
Sorting and filtering in data is nice, but buried in long right-click menus.
Some things are definitely non-standard UI for a Windows application, so it might be hard for die-hard Windows fans to get used to.
Overall, we are happy with the functionality of the platform. While there are are areas that we would like to see further improvement in, the tooling is highly configurable and aligns well with our use case. A mature API layer makes it straightforward to integrate with other data tooling. Alation stands out for its pro-active engagement with their customers, both to resolve issues and in communicating their feature roadmap
Mostly because the search feature is case sensitive. This causes issues when users are searching for an industry standard acronym. These acronyms exist as attributes in thousands of places across our data ecosystem. Alation allows stewards to endorse attributes so that these endorsed items rise to the top of search results. The problem is no one types acronyms in caps in a search field. Alation returns results matching the case (lower-case) and in several instances the endorsed attributes don't even appear on the first page of results
The account management and technical support teams are both excellent. There is regular account manager engagement, and technical issues are generally resolved very quickly. The vendor engages us in product development through regular updates on the product strategy & feature roadmap.
Not a lot of users have DBeaver so fewer resources are available online to help you if you have any issues. When I was trying to figure out how to create my own ER diagrams, it was a little tough to find resources
Key insight from implementing Alation is that, as a cloud-based SaaS product, the majority of effort is not infrastructure-related but instead focused on security configuration and integration with existing platforms, including identity management, access controls, and metadata connectivity to core data systems. Because of its data profiling functionality, careful consideration had to be given to data security and data sovereignty.
Alation provided the right balance of connection with systems in use, trusted reputation and affordability. The product integrates with current ways of working and does not require reorganisation within other lines of business.
MySQL workbench from MySQL only supports MySQL databases and it only provides basic functionality. On top of that, the user experience could be quite confusing for first-time users. SSMS from SQL server doesn't support inline editing nicely. The view for inline editing and view data is different, making it uncomfortable to use. All in all, DBeaver is the best tool when you manage a lot of databases with different types.
Provides a place where people can go to find things
When we first implemented, someone was concerned that people would now see what a mess our data environment was. I consider that a feature. We can't clean up if we can't see what we have.
