Release Notes 4.18.x

Release 4.18.0

Improvements

  • Users can now use advanced search to find conversations that have not received a response.

  • Significant performance increase for large Excel Live reports.

  • Deprecation propagation of data source objects. Click here for more details.

  • Added option to remove individual users from a shared query.

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved data dictionary download issue where no differentiation was visible between empty and not applied custom fields.

  • Resolved issue where non-admin users were not able to view Projects, Workbooks and Reports.

  • Resolved issue where uploaded images in conversations were not showing after save.

  • Resolved issue where article children could not be removed.

Admin Release Notes

New Features

  • Alation now supports the Lineage GET API that returns a list of all relevant lineages for a given table key and table type (not including query or script text).

  • Permission enforcement selection available in BI Server Settings page.

  • API to upload and get BI server metadata have been updated.

Improvements

  • Microstrategy lineage is now available. To support this option, customers need to move to the new Generic BI Models (GBM). To migrate to this new model by script follow these instructions.

  • Admins can now remove the compose option from the home page for users wearing the analyst hat. Setting can be found in Admin ❯ Settings ❯ Compose called “Show Compose Queries on Home Page”

  • Stored user credentials for data sources can now be set to expire after a certain number of days. Click here for instructions.

  • Proxy support for Alation health and usage information connection to Alation Inc. Click this link for instructions.

  • Improved error handling and messaging for Hive query log ingestion.

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved MicroStrategy extraction errors due to null fields.

  • Resolved 500 error which occurred sometimes when accessing Admin ❯ Settings ❯ Authentication page.

  • Resolved issue where date range option was not available for query log ingestion on Postgres SQL.

  • Resolved issue where LDAP authentication fails when an LDAP name record has a non-ASCII character.

Release 4.18.1

Admin Release Notes

Bug Fixes

  • Improved performance and hardened MDE extraction for Oracle.

Release 4.18.2

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue where flags weren’t loading correctly for ExpressionTemplate and Predicate catalog pages.

  • Resolved an issue that would occur when a data source had Obfuscate Literals turned on. A user viewing an obfuscated Compose query would see the query as a single line with most whitespace removed and literals were replaced with “<var1>”. Whitespace is no longer trimmed and running the resulting query now prompts the user with a query form instead of failing.

Admin Release Notes

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a regression introduced in 4.18.1 where Query Log Ingestion would fail on Oracle due to an invalid month parameter.

  • Addressed behavior introduced in 4.6.0 where Metadata Extraction for Greenplum and Postgres databases would omit tables which had a comment (in the source database) on one of their columns but no comment on the table itself. These tables are no longer skipped.

Release 4.18.3

Admin Release Notes

Improvements

  • Alation now supports nonstandard system home directory and shell for UNIX accounts used by Alation on the server.

Release 4.18.4

Admin Release Notes

Improvements

  • Improvements to Snowflake support.  Alation now supports metadata extraction, sampling, and Compose access for Snowflake Data Warehouse.  Query Log Ingestion is not yet supported.

Release 4.18.5

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue where Compose results would sometimes not render until the user switched tabs and switched back.

  • Resolved an issue where Compose SmartSuggest would not return a full list of matching objects when the data source has objects with uppercase characters in the name.  SmartSuggest should now show up to 10 matching items, regardless of case.

  • Resolved an issue where Compose SmartSuggest did not suggest tables in order of popularity.  Now SmartSuggest should suggest the most popular tables first.

Release 4.18.7

Improvements

  • Improved support for Tableau release 10.5.

 Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug introduced in 4.18 which would prevent the “Shared With Me” section of the Compose Query Browser from loading.

  • Fixed an issue where Alation would strip all comments from scheduled queries and queries run through Excel Live Report. These comments could contain semantic content, such as hints to the database engine. Alation now sends the comments along with the query, but will not send them as a statement by themselves (i.e. a comment that is the last line in a query)

  • Fixed an issue where, in some enterprise environments, Alation was unable to provision linux system users with the right permissions in the Alation Shell environment, which would result in a failure during software upgrade. Alation will now check and reset the permissions if necessary.

  • Fixed a bug introduced in 4.18.0 where killing an in-progress Tableau Extraction or Virtual Data Source upload job would hide the status of any current or past jobs of that type. The actual jobs would continue to run on schedule, but not be visible in the settings pages. This could happen if the machine or server was restarted in the middle of one of these jobs or they were killed by the OS or a sysadmin. Now, current and past Tableau Extraction and Virtual Data Source upload jobs will show on settings pages.

  • This release disables a control for video uploads to the rich text editor (used in Articles). Previously, video files were being uploaded to an external website for staging purposes. We have verified that any uploaded videos were deleted from the external server shortly after upload. Users can continue to embed video from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources.