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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Azure Data Catalog
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Microsoft's Azure Data Catalog is an enterprise-wide metadata catalog designed to make data asset discovery straightforward, a fully-managed service that lets analysts. data scientists, and developers to register, enrich, discover, understand, and consume data sources.
Alation is pretty easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves with Alation's help, no 3rd party needed. We are currently migrating to Snowflake, and it has been helpful with prioritizing what gets migrated. It's great for searching for tables and views. I even use it when I'm trying to find fields in a large table. If I'm not sure if the field is called first_name, firstname, or fname, I can use Alation's table page, filter for fields with "name", and easily find it.
Azure Data Catalog has helped our data governance and BI efforts. It's an enterprise-level data dictionary that grows with our data ecosystem. We build cloud-native apps with data management tools. And we get insights quickly and with less overhead, and the drag-and-drop interface is one of the best parts of it. Drag-and-drop is easy so that we can deliver quickly. Visual effects make it more flexible. One thing to note is that working on it requires some skill to maintain the integrity of all the components. Another improvement would be lowering the licensing cost.
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.
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
From the RightStart Program to the Customer Success team to technical support, Alation has it all covered. They respond quickly and expertly to answer my questions and fix my problems.
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
To create cloud-native applications, we rely on Azure Data Catalog for data management. I believe it was better suited to our organization and maturity level regarding costs and onboarding procedures. We can get insights quickly and with less work. Familiarity also played a role in our choice. In general, I believe this product is worthwhile. But the IT environment in which it will be deployed will impact this. Therefore, compared to other tools on the market, Azure Data Catalog is the best option.
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.
