Troubleshooting

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Core Connector Core connectors are included with all Alation platform tiers (subject to each tier’s connector limits) and are fully supported by Alation.

For general recommendations on troubleshooting OCF connectors, refer to Troubleshoot OCF Connectors.

Find specific troubleshooting scenarios below:

Shared objects missing after MDE

If the shared objects are missing after performing metadata extraction, ensure that the Extract Data Shares flag is enabled in the Metadata Extraction tab of the Redshift consumer data source settings. See Enable Data Shares Extraction for instructions.

Lineage Generation fails

If the lineage generation fails or not starting, ensure that the alation_conf alation.ocf.mde.direct_lineage.enable_extraction flag is set to true.

Note

This limitation applies only to Alation customer-managed instances. If you encounter this issue in Alation Cloud Service, contact Alation Support.

Columns Marked As No Nulls, Allow Null Values

Problem

In specific tables or views in Redshift, some columns display a no nulls label in the datatype section. However, these columns allow null values.

Limitation

Redshift doesn’t provide accurate nullability information for columns in specific view or table types. The connector interprets these columns as non-nullable when they actually allow null values.

This is a limitation in Redshift, and not an issue with the Redshift OCF connector.

This issue often occurs for:

  • Views with no schema binding

  • External views (Spectrum/Glue)

  • Internal tables