Intuitive, Easy to Use, Quick to Implement Data Catalog
February 06, 2025

Intuitive, Easy to Use, Quick to Implement Data Catalog

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Alation Data Catalog

Alation is used in our organization as a way to enable users to find trusted data. Like any other organization, many data objects can have similar names so a data catalog is needed to make metadata easy to curate and simple to find and understand. The scope of our use case is any consumable data...raw form direct from data sources, prepared reports and dashboards.

Pros

  • Bulk curation- Alation makes it easy for a data steward to quickly upload a data dictionary. It's also super simple to find dozens of data objects which the steward wants to associate themselves to.
  • Implementation- Like any other solution, an investment of time is required to configure the product and your environment. What Alation Data Catalog does well is allowing different admin roles to easily configure the catalog and even customize fields needed by our consumers. Getting to value is super fast with Alation.

Cons

  • Lineage- only table level lineage is included as standard. To view column level lineage, you have to pay extra to unlock. I felt this could have been communicated better earlier in the process.
  • Conversations- this is one of the best selling points of the tool but what is lacking is a quick and easy way for an admin to monitor conversations. Sure you can run custom queries to see which questions haven't been addressed but I feel this should be part of the built-in reporting.
  • We've had limited but very positive impact for 3 data subject matter experts. In the past they were fielding very similar questions from users stumbling on their data. Now, rather than responding to each email or chat message, they not only direct users to the catalog but they also reach out to me to do a walk-through of Alation's other features.
  • Another positive impact is having the data dictionary live in one location. This has been tremendous in making the dictionaries accessible and consistent.
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.
Alation might not have the same level of technical capabilities and features as these others (though it's very close) but what Alation offers is a neat and easy to learn UI. The new UI is even better, bringing more content onto the same space like Informatica while maintaining the friendly interface of the old UI.

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

Not sure

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

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.

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