Bulk Utility (Deprecated)

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Warning

Deprecation Notice — Alation deprecated the Bulk Utility in version 2026.4.1.0. The feature may continue to function as-is but has known issues and limitations. Alation no longer accepts new support cases or enhancement requests for this feature.

We recommend the following successor solutions:

• For Document Hubs: Use Bulk Management — Bulk Curate Documents, which supports both Bulk Creation and Bulk Update of documents (including terms within Document Hubs) directly from the Document Hubs UI. Bulk Management reached General Availability (GA) in 2026.4.1.0.

• For other object types (tables, columns, schemas, data sources, and BI objects): Use Data Dictionary to download and upload metadata via CSV for bulk updates.

Recommended Alternatives

Use Case	Recommended Solution	Documentation
Bulk creation of documents in Document Hubs	Bulk Management (Bulk Creation)	Bulk Curate Documents Using Bulk Management
Bulk editing of documents in Document Hubs	Bulk Management (Bulk Update)	Bulk Curate Documents Using Bulk Management
Migrating articles to Document Hubs	Migrate Articles to Document Hubs	Migrate Articles to Document Hubs
Bulk update of metadata for tables, columns, schemas, data sources, and BI objects	Data Dictionary	Data Dictionaries

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Overview

Note

The content below is retained for reference. The Bulk Utility may have known issues and limitations that will not be addressed.

The Bulk Utility is a beta feature that allows Server Admins and Catalog Admins to create, edit, and delete objects via file upload. The following scenarios are supported:

• Migrating articles to glossary terms

• Bulk creation or editing of glossary terms

• Bulk creation or editing of articles

Bulk edit or creation of any other object type is not supported.

Note

If you’ve enabled Document Hubs, the Bulk Utility will continue to work for terms in the built-in Glossary Hub. The Bulk Utility can’t be used to create or edit documents in other document hubs.

Enable the Bulk Utility

The Bulk Utility is available to Server and Catalog Admins once a Server Admin has enabled the Bulk Utility feature flag on the Feature Configuration page:

Access the Bulk Utility

Server Admins can access the Bulk Utility tool from the Admin Settings page:

Both Server Admins and Catalog Admins can also access the Bulk Utility tool by appending /bulk-utility/ to the end of the catalog URL. The utility appears as a generated Article within Alation:

The Article is named “Bulk Utility (user.name)”, where “user.name” is the user who accessed the page. The article is set to private; only other Catalog and Server Admins can see it.

Warning

Do not change the permission settings! This ensures that this feature is used only by you—other users will have their own copy of the article with permissions set for them.