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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Talend Data Fabric
Score 9.5 out of 10
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The Talend Data Fabric helps organizations to achieve and maintain complete, trustworthy, and uncompromised data, so that they can stay in control, mitigate risk, and drive value.
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.
The best scenario that I see as productive is having several sources of information, the tool allows me to consolidate in a single income channel allowing me to maintain the integrity of the information, I like the treatment of financial data since speed and accuracy are needed in the accounting records. I believe that in any industry this tool would be 100% productive.
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.
It supports a wide variety of connectors (Systems/endpoints)
It provides great flexibility for developers as it not only has a lot of predefined ready to use the function but also provides the ability to use complex java code within the platform. Great tool if you have good developers available.
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
At this moment the usability of Talend Data Quality is optimal, too bad I cannot say the same in the first three months, it was always a problem due to its steep learning curve, but what matters is being able to use it effectively at this precise moment.
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.
Talend Data Quality gave us direct help in the learning process and prevented us from taking many more months to adapt and I appreciate this from the heart, I think that thanks to the support we can have very detailed reports that help increase the use of Talend Data Quality in the company.
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
1) Talend offers more than 200 palettes, but most of them are repeated. For Example in Pentaho, we can use a single component ( Microsoft Excel input ) and we can get the data, sheet name, file name, and all other things like using a wildcard, etc. 2. Talend is an open-source tool that makes it easily accessible.
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.
