Release Notes 4.1.0

In the new year, we’ve resolved to make Alation better than ever—both on the surface and below the hood! This release, we’ve cleaned up some bugs in 4.0 and made a few enhancements described below. In the coming months, we’re excited to bring lots of new functionality you’ve been asking for and some special surprises we think you’ll like…

We hope this new year will bring new users to Alation within your organization. In preparation for that, we’ve added an in-app on-boarding experience to help them get situated and discover features they might like given their interests and job roles. If you, as a current user, would like a fuller tour, you can choose to take one at any time in the Help menu, which is also now the place to go in order to get support for both Catalog and Compose). In 4.1 the new Welcoming experience is disabled by default, but if you think your company would benefit from it, contact your Alation Solutions engineer.

As summer was ending, we released Alation 3.9, “Shaking it up: Separation is Natural.” In that release, we expanded the ways Compose can connect to a database across multiple tabs. In theory, a query tool can either open a separate connection to a given database in each tab—thereby allowing users to run multiple different queries in parallel—or can share a single connection across multiple tabs, allowing a user to create a temporary table in one tab and access it from another. Before 3.9, Compose used to always do the latter. But depending on a database’s properties and an organization’s setup, the other approach might be optimal. Starting in 3.9, admins could flip a switch for each Data Source in Settings between the two modes. Now in 4.1, Compose will “do the right thing” by default (though if your admins disagree with our suggestions, they can still change them in Settings). In particular, the following data source types now default to connection-per-tab :

  • Greenplum

  • Hive

  • Impala

  • Netezza

  • MySQL

  • Presto

  • Amazon Redshift

  • Microsoft SQL Server

  • Vertica

And as mentioned earlier, we’ve fixed the bugs where …

popularity bars would sometimes be inflated when Alation would count query object mentions twice—once from within Compose and once from parsing the query logs

in Compose,

  • it is difficult to see which columns are sorted

  • closing a discarded query triggers the Unsaved Changes dialog

  • users can’t fully see the effect of selecting a new theme before clicking Apply

on article pages,

  • file attachments are sometimes corrupted

  • saving after emptying the body field does not stick

  • the Share status is invisible when you don’t have permission to edit sharing settings

after profiling, some data and metadata would not display properly on Table and Column pages

and more…

Admin Release Notes

We’ve made improvements so…

  • you, as an admin, can delete stale Flags (deprecations, warnings, or endorsements) left by someone else

  • in User Settings, you can now see separate counts for active and inactive users

And we’ve fixed the bugs where…

  • the ReportSources APIs did not always work reliably or as expected

  • the Teradata Query SQL on the Data Source configuration page does not show the PDCR version

  • the Tableau Settings page is partially broken