Item: Alation Data Catalog
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

1.Collects metadata and its description in one place. Keeping metadata up-to-date due to automatic regular metadata extraction.
2.Provides easy access to metadata within one tool with no necessity to request specific accesses to separate data sources.
It hepls analysts and other team members to find data which suits them best to solve their business cases (create/improve product, create reports etc).
3.Represents information about stewards, owners and other responsible people/teams around each data source.
4.Gives an oppurtunity to write articles/terms on different topics and link them with actual technical metadata.

Pros and Cons

Easy search between different objects with Advanced search.
AI generates titles. Majority of them are suitable.
Stewardship dashboard really helps stewards to work with sources they are responsible for.
There is a flexibility to add custom fields to objects` pages.

Users with no admin roles have no possibility to see the latest successfull metadata exrtaction. At out bank users are really interested in this informaton.
Viewers, not stewards, will be more motivated in contributing to Data catalog (especially describing metadata) if there is a some reward system. Yes, now we can see top contributors within Alation Analytics Dashboard, but for this purpose we need to go to this part of Data Catalog. What about some medals/bagdes, which will be shown near personal name?
There is no solution how to show data source as single source, when it has a microservice architecture and it consists of many databases? Now, for Alation DC, 1 database = 1 data source, so how should we connect, for example, 5 databases, which is known as one system?

Most Important Features

Centralized metadata
Everyone can describe metadata
Easy access to metadata
Business glossaries

Return on Investment

Testing data ingestion now takes a few days less because of centralised metadata availability and rapid accessability

Alternatives Considered

Ataccama ONE, Azure Data Catalog, MANTA Flow and AWS Glue

1.Alation is cheaper.
2.Manta meets the needs only in discovering lineage.
3.AWS Glue is more technical data catalog and it doesn`t allow to describe source or table in detailed way.
4.Alation Data Catalog is a solution that is used by other banks of our whole financial group, so it is easily to manage and work with one tool.

Key Insights

Do you think Alation Data Catalog delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Alation Data Catalog's feature set?

Yes

Did Alation Data Catalog live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Alation Data Catalog go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Alation Data Catalog again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Jira Software, Jira Service Management, AWS Glue

Likelihood to Recommend

Where Alation Data Catalog is well suited:
1.Collecting metadata in one place with easy access to its.2. Providing possibility to find metadata by techical names as well as business description. It`s possible to search among all objects being on Advanced search page or to search certain schema/table/column being on respective objects` pages.
Where it is less appropriate: 1.There is a lineage functionality, but it shows lineage mostly for views within one data source. It`s impossible to see the lineage for any table viewer is interested in and the one way to do this - create lineage manually, what can do only Admins.

Users and Roles

200 - Most of them are analysts (business, product). They find suitable metadata.
Some of them are IT support (devops) related. They can be as Data source admins and hepl to connect Alation to data sources or they can become stewards because they know sense and purpose of tables (=can provide business metadata).

First experience with cataloging

Overall Satisfaction with Alation Data Catalog