Item: Alation Data Catalog
Rating: 10
Author: Karla Kirton

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Alation to support our decentralised data architecture. It acts as our discovery layer for users to find the information and/or data source for their use case

Pros and Cons

Business Glossary
Search feature
Data source management

Lineage connections between different data sources
Glossary links (from one glossary to another)

Most Important Features

Lineage
Glossary
Data source connection
Labelling

Return on Investment

Speeds up time for discovery
Reduced duplication of effort

Alternatives Considered

Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud, data.world and Atlan

Additionally GCP data catalog (not on the listed selection options)

Alation had a far more feature rich product, that connected well to our data architecture. None of the other tools at the time supported a connection to Kafka which is fundamental to our data processing.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Alation Data Catalog go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Alation Data Catalog again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Alation is perfect for managing data ownership and stewardship, acting as the 'front door' or 'window' to data, glossary terms, domain homepages. It is great for consumers to find out about the update schedule on their current data sources or ones they will potentially use in future.

I'm less inclined to use the 'direct connection' via Alation to data sources, mainly for decoupling dependencies for any production supporting applications with Alation (if Alation goes down, we don't want it to take the connection down). But it is a great tool for putting the producers and consumers in touch with each other to arrange the connection.

Alation Data Catalog

Overall Satisfaction with Alation Data Catalog