Release Notes V R7 (General Availability)

RELEASE 5.12.14

Fixed the issue of the Lexicon job failing with an “overflow error” by introducing logic that can handle a critically large number of user feedback responses to the abbreviation-expansion matches suggested by Lexicon.

RELEASE 5.12.13

  • For Google BigQuery sources, fixed an issue with MDE and Profiling not working after changes to the service account setup. When a user account certificate was uploaded in addition to the service account and then deleted, MDE and Profiling became unavailable. This issue has now been fixed.

  • Previously, with SAML authentication enabled, users whose account was inactive (suspended or pending activation) became caught in a redirection loop between their IdP and the Alation server when they tried to log in to Alation. Now, users with inactive accounts will be redirected to the Inactive Users page.

RELEASE 5.12.12

  • Previously, when one database was cataloged in Alation as multiple Data Sources, each of them containing different schemas from this database, and a BI object was sourced from database objects in different Data Sources, only one lineage diagram was displayed correctly, while others would display objects existing in Alation as TMP objects. This issue has now been fixed.

  • Previously, Unicode characters in user display names caused an internal error in search indexing. As a result, Conversations assigned to users with Unicode characters in display names would not be indexed and attempts to navigate to them would result in an error. This has now been fixed.

RELEASE 5.12.11

  • Added alation.feature_flags.enabled_flash_plugin flag to the alation_conf utility. Setting it to False hides the Adobe Flash-dependent Copy and Download buttons from QLI Preview actions.

  • Previously, Snowflake CREATE VIEW queries with COPY GRANTS keywords did not show up in the View SQL area and the Lineage diagram. Now, such queries will be displayed correctly.

  • Optimized the data sources API to reduce the loading time of the Sources page.

  • Fixed an issue where the use of the usage reporting feature (Admin Settings > Reporting) resulted in an incomplete usage data package and an error. After the fix, an admin can successfully upload usage metrics from the Alation instance.

RELEASE 5.12.10

  • Fixed the issue of email notifications not being sent to all users @-mentioned in a Conversation if multiple users were @-mentioned in one post.

  • Added two configurable fields to the Settings page of SSRS BI sources: Report Server virtual directory and Report Manager virtual directory. Previously, these parameters were not configurable and were always set to the default values of ReportServer and Reports. Users can now configure these fields in Alation, which allows them to use the SSRS connector without changing the configuration on their SSRS server.

RELEASE 5.12.9

  • In Compose, for a new data source, when users clicked any of the Run buttons, Compose would not respond until the page was refreshed. This also caused the query auto-complete to not work. The fix ensures that the Run buttons and auto-complete work on the first try.

  • Fixed a bug that had previously caused errors when the Stewardship Dashboard was loading due to missing data about some catalog object types.

RELEASE 5.12.8

  • Catalog representation of the struct data type for Google BigQuery has been improved to fully support struct composition.

  • Fixed several issues with extraction from Tableau sources:

    • Fixed null pointer exceptions generated by a bad reconnection strategy when extracting from the Tableau Postgres database.

    • Fixed download timeout exceptions due to the download timeout not being respected.

    • Fixed null pointer exceptions caused by repository locations being identified by the View ID instead of the Sheet ID.

    • Fixed an issue caused by leftover Parameters data sources that Tableau does not clean up.

  • Fixed an issue where lineage was not generated for Snowflake query statements ingested during QLI that contained a CREATE VIEW statement and the current_user function within the query.

  • For Snowflake users, improved object resolution when parsing queries. Alation will now properly leverage database and schema information when resolving objects mentioned in queries using their unqualified names. This improves the capability to tie a mention in a query back to an object catalogued in Alation. Previously, unqualified names from Snowflake were resolved as temp objects, impacting popularity calculations and lineage.

  • Fixed an issue where as the result of the regular encryption key rotations, the size of the /data1/tmp folder grew indefinitely. After this fix, the temp files that are created during key rotation are automatically cleared from /tmp.

  • Fixed the issue where updating logical metadata values using the logical metadata public API did not work correctly when object names included mixed case (both uppercase and lowercase characters).

  • Enhanced validation of SVG files that are uploaded for co-branding to preclude XSS and XSRF attacks.

  • Enhanced application security by securing query titles.

  • Enhanced application security by securing a number of pages that did not respect user page permissions.

RELEASE 5.12.7

This patch delivers the Alation product changes required to complete the migration of the Alation technical support operations to the new platform: Service Cloud.

Alation Zendesk Help Center, which was previously used by the Alation technical support to manage support requests from users, is going to be turned off on July 2, 2020 11:59 pm PST. After this time, if users try to raise a ticket using the Zendesk widget or click on any of the Zendesk Help Center links in Alation, they will receive an error message until this patch is installed.

In this patch:

  • The Zendesk Support widget has been removed;

  • Built-in links to Zendesk Help Center have been removed;

  • The links to the Alation product documentation have been retargeted to the active product documentation site. Docs are available to all Alation users, and no additional configuration is required. See Access Alation Product Docs below.

  • Designated Service Cloud admin users have the ability to contact Alation Support directly from Alation if this is additionally configured on the Alation instance. Your organization will inform all Alation users who your designated admins are.

  • All users have the ability to access your internal help desk if this is additionally configured on the Alation instance.

If you are an Alation admin, then after this patch is applied, please make sure to perform the additional configuration to display links to the Service Cloud and your internal help desk:

Access Alation Product Docs

The Visit Help Center link that takes you to the Docs site is available to all users and has no dependency on their Alation user role. To open the docs:

  • In the Alation Catalog, open the Information menu from the main toolbar and click the Visit Help Center link:

    ../../../_images/R7_visit_help_center1.png

  • In Compose, click the Help menu on the top right and then click Visit Help Center.

    ../../../_images/R7_visit_help_center2.png

Known Issue

Clicking on a result link on the Search results page on the documentation site is incorrectly redirected to the login page of the hosting platform instead of the appropriate documentation topic. The Engineering team is working to resolve this issue in the short run.

RELEASE 5.12.6

Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets

Support Ticket #

Description

16497

Fixed an issue where QLI from a PostgreSQL source skipped query statements that did not contain duration. Previous implementation of the QLI from PostgreSQL excluded such statements. After the fix, query statements without duration are ingested too.

17807

Fixed an issue with metadata extraction from Tableau sources (GBM V2) where Lineage was only partially calculated with a “missing attribute” error in logs.

Miscellaneous Other Fixes

  • Changed the way Google BigQuery user certificates are stored on the server. They are now securely stored in the internal Postgres database in an encrypted format.

RELEASE 5.12.5

Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets

Support Ticket #

Description

11171

17286

17554

Fixed an issue where Tableau workbooks and projects were not displayed in the Alation Catalog when Permission Mirroring was enabled.

15585

15974

16653

17585

Updated the Web Data Connector library to support Tableau 2020.x versions. Before this upgrade, an attempt to use the Web Data Connector would throw an error that the Web Data Connector library required an upgrade to the latest version. This will no longer be the case.

16474

16593

17061

17187

17213

The parse tree node traversal algorithm has been optimized to exponentially reduce time taken to parse ingested queries. Query parsing occurs as the second stage of Query Log Ingestion (right after the ingestion phase). The issue would manifest itself as high CPU loads after QLI jobs launch and a long time taken to complete QLI pipeline processing as parsing was bottlenecking the entire QLI pipeline. This fix addresses performance issues stemming from parsing and will reduce CPU load on Alation servers related to QLI jobs.

17034

Previously, with the Viewer role feature enabled, Server Admins could not delete article attachments, and Steward and Composer roles could not add article attachments. This has been fixed: all roles except Viewer can delete article attachments; Stewards and Composers can now add article attachments.

RELEASE 5.12.4

Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets

Support Ticket #

Description

14981

Previously, after assigning a Steward to data objects using the Shared Fields in a catalog set, the back-reference to these data objects was not displayed on the corresponding User or Group profile page. Now, the User or Group profile pages will display all members of the catalog set to which this user or group has been assigned via a catalog set.

15270

Configuration-based Hive deployments now support partial success results for MDE.

Miscellaneous Other Fixes

  • Migration to V R7 failed for some customers with a serialization error. Fixed by updating the migration to not serialize the whole data objects into memory.

  • Miscellaneous other fixes.

RELEASE 5.12.3

New Features

File Systems Access Control

File System Sources can now be made Private, which limits access to such sources for users without permissions. Private file system sources can only be viewed and discovered by users who are assigned as Viewers or File System Admins to this source.

File System Admins can be assigned to a Public file system source too. Only File System Admins can access the Settings page of a file system source, Public or Private. All catalog users can view the catalog pages of a Public file system source.

If the Viewer role is enforced in an instance, then only admin-level users (Server, Catalog, and Source Admins) can access the Settings page of a file system source and only when they are assigned as File System Admins to this source. See Access to File Systems.

Improvements

Some changes were made to the UI of the License and Users tabs in the Admin Settings based on the early release feedback from Alation users. Because the new system of licensing is not enforced in V R7 (5.12.x), the License Type column has been hidden from the Licensed Users table of the Users tab and reference to licenses was removed from the Compare User Roles info-box on the License tab.

Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets

Support Ticket #

Description

16000

Added a configuration option to support a customer-specific LDAP group import case.

16340

Added support for null values in Azure Blob Storage metadata. Previously, null values passed in the metadata might cause errors during metadata extraction.

16633

Fixed an issue with adding image data using the Article API: rich text values now accept such data as Base64-encoded images in the <img src=””> tag. Base64 images can also be added to the article Body field in the code mode in Alation UI.

16637

Fixed the ability to use anchors in the Body field of articles, which allows users to create internal links to article sections. Anchors can be added using the <a href=”#AnchorName”></a> and <a name=”AnchorName”></a> HTML tags in the code view of the article Body field.

16993

17166

In versions 5.12.0 to 5.12.2, when SAML authentication was configured on the Alation server, users with usernames longer than 30 characters found themselves unable to log in to Alation. Now, this is fixed and users with long usernames can successfully log in.

Miscellaneous Other Fixes

  • Fixed a known V R7 GA issue where users with the Viewer role had access to query forms on catalog pages of Query objects when the Viewer role was enforced. Now, access to query forms has been disabled for the Viewer role.

  • Fixed a known V R7 GA issue where users with the Viewer role received an error message when changing the Alation password on the User Profile page. Now, the new password can be successfully saved.

  • Fixed an issue where users with the Viewer role could see and click the Add Tag icon on catalog pages of dataflow and BI objects. Now, the Add Tag icon will appear as disabled for Viewers.

  • Fixed a known V R7 GA issue where the Add Stewards icon on catalog pages of file system and API resource objects appeared as active for users with the Viewer role, although clicking it resulted in an “Insufficient Permissions” error. Now, the Add Stewards icon will be disabled for the Viewer role.

  • Fixed a known V R7 GA issue where Date, Picker, and Multi-Picker custom fields on catalog pages of file system sources appeared as modifiable to users with the Viewer role, although an attempt to update the field resulted in an “Insufficient Permissions” error. Now, the Edit controls for these fields will appear as disabled to the Viewer role.

  • Fixed a known V R7 GA issue where several custom fields on catalog pages of dataflow and BI objects would appear modifiable to users with the Viewer role. Now, all custom fields are displayed as read-only for Viewers.

  • Miscellaneous other fixes as part of continuous effort to improve product quality.

RELEASE 5.12.2

Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets

Support Ticket #

Description

7941

For Sybase IQ data sources, the Column catalog page will now show the precision and scale for the numeric data types DECIMAL, NUMERIC, FLOAT, and DOUBLE.

11067

Fixed an issue where the Data Objects Without Stewards report would display private data sources that the currently signed-in user did not have access to. The report now only shows data objects (schemas, tables, columns) that the current user can access.

11171

13460

14730

For Tableau BI sources, several errors that would previously occur during extraction have been addressed. The errors include:

  • 401 due to idle session timeout

  • PostgresEndpoint Socket closure

  • Index -1 in DatasourceHandler

  • Multiple calls for API version

  • Fixed NPEs from Tableau Sheets

  • Null type errors

Overall stability of Tableau extraction has been improved.

12713

For the Upload Logical Metadata API, added ability to use caps in names of profile attributes.

13029

13436

Fixed an issue where Excel Live Reports did not work for DB2 sources.

14030

Improved page loading performance for cases when the Catalog has a very large number of data sources.

15877

Added an alation_conf flag alation.feature_flags.enable_zendesk_help_center that allows admins to disable links to the Help Center and Release Notes under the Information menu.

16246

Metadata Extraction would previously fail if null characters were encountered in the SQL definition of a view. Alation will now remove these null characters as part of the ingestion process, preventing the failure.

Miscellaneous Other Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where the Author column was not sortable in the Glossary table. Now, it is possible to sort the Glossary articles by Author.

RELEASE 5.12.1 - General Availability (GA)

New Features

Synonym extraction for Oracle and SQL Server sources

Added ability to enable synonym extraction for Oracle and SQL Server data sources. Synonyms will be automatically extracted during metadata extraction (MDE), and a dedicated catalog page will be created for each extracted synonym in the data catalog. For Oracle sources, both private and public synonym types can be extracted. Public synonyms will be located in the schema PUBLIC. Private synonyms are extracted with the schemas they exist in. For SQL Server sources, Alation extracts synonyms with their respective schemas. Synonyms inherit most of the functionality of Table objects: Popularity, Filters and Joins information, sampling, data dictionary, Trust Flags, and other features apply to synonyms too. Lineage and data upload are not supported. See Extracting Synonyms for details.

Improved Snowflake support

  • Updated the built-in driver for Snowflake data sources to the new version (3.10.0) with enhanced support for parsing Compose queries and Snowflake query logs during QLI. The new driver version supports TLS 1.2 enabling connection to Snowflake after TLS 1.1 reaches EOL in the first half of 2020.

  • Added support for parsing CTE (Common Table Expressions) during QLI from Snowflake data sources. As the result, the Filters, Joins, and Lineage tabs for Table objects will reflect the data resulting from parsing queries with CTE’s during QLI. A known limitation is that some queries with complex CTE syntax may still not be parsed correctly during QLI (for example, queries that contain both RECURSIVE and UNION keywords).

  • QLI improvements previously, QLI for Snowflake data sources was performed using the QUERY_HISTORY table function of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA which is limited to extracting a maximum of 10,000 query logs for the last seven days and is further optimized to fetch 10,000 query logs for the last 24 hours. This improvement introduces a new way to perform QLI: it is now possible to configure QLI to run on the QUERY_HISTORY view of the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema which does not have this limitation. For more information, see Snowflake.

  • Added JDBC URI support for Snowflake data sources.

  • Added ability to extract Snowflake view definition using SHOW VIEWS and GET_DDL commands

  • Added support for stored procedures

  • Various bug fixes, including fixing an issue with sampling for columns with binary data types and issues with the data upload functionality

GBM V2 APIs using Open API 3.0

Released new Generic Business Intelligence Model (GBM) V2 APIs that allow creating, updating, and deleting catalog objects for virtual Business Intelligence (BI) sources, as well as reading catalog pages for both virtual and real BI sources. The GBM V2 APIs are described using the Open API 3.0 Specification (OAS). The RESTful operations supported by BI APIs will allow developers to build integrations to manage resources via a set of CRUD operations referring to Create (POST), Read (GET), Update (PATCH) and Delete (DELETE). To enable the use of GBM V2 APIs, set to True the alation_conf parameter alation.feature_flags.enable_swagger, and API documentation will be available at <your_alation_instance_url>/openapi/gbmv2/. See GBM V2 APIs Overview for more details.

Customizable templates for Schema and Data Source pages

Added greater flexibility in customizing the templates of the Data Source and Schema catalog pages. You can now customize the layout and order of fields and custom field groupings.

Encryption key rotation

Encryption keys can now be rotated on demand on the new Admin Settings > Server Admin > Encryption Key Rotation page. Regular key rotation is a recommended practice to achieve compliance with data security requirements at organizations. See Encryption Key Rotation.

Elasticsearch upgrade

The Elasticsearch component of the Alation application has been upgraded to version 7.4 to take advantage of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. See Elasticsearch Upgrade to 7.4 FAQ and Troubleshooting for details.

License management

Alation is transiting to a new licensing model with four types of “seats” for users: Admin, Composer, Steward, and Viewer. Each type of license is correlated with a user role in Alation; however, in this release license-based user limit is not enforced. Server Admins can monitor the current license seat consumption on the new Admin Settings > Server Admin > License page. See License.

New system of user roles

Starting with V R7, there will be 6 user roles in Alation: Server Admin, Catalog Admin, Source Admin, Composer, Steward, and Viewer. The Standard User role that existed in previous releases is no longer present. If your instance is updated to V R7 (5.12.x) from a previous release, you will notice changes in role assignment where users who previously had the Standard User role will be automatically assigned one of the new roles: Source Admin, Composer, or Steward. All existing users will be able to continue using Alation with the same level of permissions as before despite the change in their role assignment. New users who sign up for an Alation account will be assigned the Viewer role by default. See Roles Overview. Also see Managing Users V R7 (5.12.x) for changes in User Management UI.

Viewer role

V R7 Introduces the new Viewer role: Viewers can browse the catalog, but no editing or creating of objects is allowed. Enforcement of the Viewer role is disabled by default and must be enabled using the dedicated feature flag. See Viewer Role.

Lineage V2 diagram enhancements

Lineage V2 diagram has been enhanced with several new interactive features to enable you to explore lineage in depth:

  • When lineage is complex, some of the data nodes may be truncated on the diagram and hidden under a collapsed node called More nodes. Now, you can interactively reveal the truncated nodes and display them on the diagram one by one.

  • It is now possible to explore additional source and target lineage links of an object directly on the Lineage diagram by revealing additional upstream and downstream lineage links for each node.

Glossary UI and UX improvements

Improved user experience of the Glossaries section by implementing several changes to the look and feel of the tables holding glossary information:

  • the Author column is now sortable

  • added breadcrumbs for improved navigation

  • columns containing People Sets values (such as Author or Experts) no longer display the avatar next to the user’s name

  • group titles have the Group icon next to them to indicate a Group object

  • other UI fixes for a better user experience with Alation Glossaries.

New Search (Beta)

Rolling out a completely redesigned search experience with the goal to boost search quality. The new search accommodates for reported issues, feedback, and enhancement requests Alation has received from its users. This is a BETA feature. To try it out, turn on the Enable Beta Search for all users feature flag in Admin Settings > Server Admin > Labs. This will reveal the Search BETA menu item under the Search menu on the main toolbar.

Data Source Certifications

Confirmed support for:

  • Tableau 2019.4, 2020.1

  • Mongo DB 4.2 (as Custom DB with a CData driver)

  • MicroStrategy Cloud 2019

  • EMR 5.27

  • CDH 6.3

  • SQL Server 2019

  • PostgreSQL 12

  • AWS Databricks

  • SSRS

  • MySQL 8.0

  • SAP HANA 2.0

Improvements

Catalog

  • All Analytics Stewardship features are now enabled by default, which includes My Stewardship Dashboard, Tasks and Inbox, Agile Approval, Curation Progress, Data Objects Without Stewards, and Catalog Activity. The Curate menu is now available on the main toolbar for users with the Steward hat providing quick access to the Stewardship features.

  • Previously, clicking on Deprecate and Warning trust flags that a user has set before, would remove the deprecation or warning, and users often accidentally removed flags by clicking on the icons. Now, a confirmation dialog pops up before the deprecation or warning flag is removed.

  • Improved performance of the Inbox and Conversations features, decreasing loading time from tens of seconds to seconds.

  • To help you quickly identify the Alation version of an instance, the Alation release number was added to the Alation logo. You can also view the product version on the About this Instance page (accessible from the Information menu).

  • Previously, Conversation sidebar for an object did not show the Referring to field for the Mentioning This field for expanded conversations. Now, the Referring to field will be displayed providing access to the other object where this given object is mentioned in a Conversation.

Lexicon

Feedback users give to ALLIE on the catalog pages of data objects by confirming and rejecting auto-suggested titles will now be applied system-wide when Lexicon is recalculated, helping to improve subsequent guesses.

Data Sources

Added ability to connect to the MongoDB data source without authentication. If the username of the service account you provide in Alation is just spaces and no other characters, then a non-authenticated connection will be established to the database.

Admin Functions

  • As an admin for Alation, you can now specify a list of file extensions allowed as attachments in articles using the alation_conf How to configure a list of allowed file types for article attachments.

  • TaskServer and Connector logs are now JSON formatted.

APIs

  • Added support for id’s of objects listed in the custom fields of an Article in data retrieved from the Articles API. The id will be listed for Object Set Field values, allowing lookups of the object on other Public APIs.

Additional Bug Fixes in GA

For the full list of fixes, see Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets and Miscellaneous Other Fixes announced in 5.12.0 (LA).

Additional Fixes:

  • Fixed an issue where Conversation titles were unescaped in email notifications, allowing the HTML to be rendered in email messages that included these titles.

  • Removed a potential BREACH attack vector from an Alation installation wizard screen.

  • Multiple other fixes improving product quality and release stability.

Known Issues in GA

  • Updating from an earlier version of V R2 (5.4.0 - 5.4.5) to V R7 will fail due to the absence of several internal changes required for this update that were added in 5.4.6. The update from 5.4.0 - 5.4.5 has to happen in two stages via one of the later versions: to V R2 5.4.10 first and then to V R7 or to V R3/ V R4/ V R5/ V R6 first, and then to V R7.

  • There may be issues with extraction from Cognos 11 where only a subset of reports in a project are extracted.

  • There are some UI issues with the Upload Data feature where the existing tables may not be listed in the Tables popup and need to be found using the quick search in this pop-up.

  • New users with the Viewer role will have to initially select a Hat, which does not change their catalog experience if the Viewer role is enforced.

  • When the Viewer role is enforced, the non-admin users are not filtered out from the list of users who can potentially be assigned as Data Source Admins. Although such users may be assigned as Data Source admins, they will not be able to access the data source settings as this requires them to be promoted to Source Admins.

  • Custom fields of types Date, Multi-picker, and Picker are not disabled on filesystem catalog page for users with the Viewer role when the Viewer role is enforced (fixed in 5.12.3).

  • Users with the Viewer role will receive the permission denied error after changing their password (fixed in 5.12.3).

  • Users with the Viewer role still have access to query forms when the Viewer role is enforced (fixed in 5.12.3).

  • Users with the Viewer role can edit the Steward field and any other custom fields for API Resource objects (fixed in 5.12.3).

  • Custom fields are not disabled on Tableau catalog pages for the Viewer role when both the GBM V2 and the Viewer role enforcement are enabled (fixed in 5.12.3).

  • For other known issues that still exist, see Known Issues identified for 5.12.0.

RELEASE 5.12.0 - Limited Availability (LA)

For feature list, see New Features in section RELEASE 5.12.1 - General Availability (GA).

Fixes Referenced by Support Tickets

Note that this release also inherits all fixes from previous releases.

Support Ticket #

Description

2842

3065

10163

10386

Fixed an issue with the data upload functionality where the quick search on the Upload Data page would not return the full result set that matched the search criteria. After the fix, the quick search returns all matching catalog objects.

11769

For QLI users, improved performance of lineage calculation. This will also improve the efficacy of QLI archiving by allowing for more data to be compressed.

12642

12732

Fixed an issue where a downloaded data dictionary did not contain a full set of metadata objects available in the catalog.

12741

Fixes a possible migration issue when moving Tableau servers to the new GBM V2 system.

12778

14200

For Tableau 2018.3 and 2019, the Preview section on a workbook object page will now show preview images for all dashboards in this workbook.

13004

14730

To ensure successful extraction from Tableau sources, extraction of the metadata objects where the parent name is missing will be skipped. This may lead to fewer extracted BI Data Source Column and BI Connection Column objects.

13202

Fixed a bug where a newline in schema names disabled selective metadata extraction. Schemas with a newline in the name no longer disable the MDE functionality.

13285

Metadata extraction process was adding some inaccurate data to the table metadatachangelog in the internal Alation server database: this data incorrectly indicated that all tables and columns were deleted for schemas with no changes; however, in the Alation catalog these tables and columns were still displayed as expected. Fixed this issue by adding a check to ignore all schemas with no changes from the metadatachangelog update query.

14588

Previously, columns with camel case names were not searchable by their exact name if the search query. Now they will be. An index update is required for this to take effect. This will take place automatically in V R7 in with the upgrade to Elasticsearch 7.

14804

For AWS Databricks, fixed column profiling for column names which include a colon and other special characters.

14967

Corrected alignment of the Favorite button in left-hand navigation.

14913

Updated Article taxonomy hover text to contain the article title.

15269

Fixed an issue where exporting a sampled table showed incorrect values if it had NULL or SENSITIVE fields. Exported table fields will now retain their original values as seen in the samples page.

Miscellaneous Other Fixes

  • References to deleted BI Servers now show [GONE] to indicate that they have been deleted.

  • Fixed a bug where Data Source rules for a Conditional Catalog Set would not reset to the original value when clicking Cancel.

  • Fixed an issue where an option Abbreviations appeared instead of Columns when selecting a value in the Referring to field. Now the option Columns is available in this list.

  • Removing automatic titling from a column object page no longer results in a JavaScript error.

  • Fixed a bug where editing the URI or the metastore URI in Data Source settings could potentially result in metadata extraction running with errors or failing to run.

  • Fixed a bug where Referring to on the Conversation catalog page would be blank when the object was untitled.

  • Fixed a bug where creating a conversation on a Catalog Set page would throw an error.

  • Previously, running the Lexicon job from the Lexicon Settings page could silently fail if the Catalog had no Data Sources. This change surfaces a message that warns that Data Sources must be added to the Catalog before Lexicon can be run.

  • For Snowflake sources, fixed Profiling for columns with binary data types.

  • For Snowflake sources, fixed an issue where on the Queries tab of schema and table objects, parts of a query were shown as comments.

  • For Snowflake sources, fixed an issue where the Joins and Filters tabs were not updated correctly after running queries with JOIN and WHERE clauses in Compose.

  • Miscellaneous other fixes, including further security improvements.

Known Issues in LA

  • Tableau Web Data Connector gives a warning message - “This version of the Web Data Connector library is deprecated”.

  • When SAML is being used for authentication, server admins cannot reject a new user who signed up for Alation by clicking Reject on the Admin Settings > Server Admin > Users tab.

  • For PostgreSQL sources, QLI may skip some of the queries that were run in 3d party applications if in the query history view they are formatted in a specific way. For example, queries that are formatted to begin with the duration attribute and not with statement (duration: 0.192 ms statement: select * from <table> where <column> =<value>)- may be skipped.

  • Advanced Search BI Server facet does not apply if you search for BI Folders in a specific BI Server.

  • Hive MDE sometimes fails with error “Could not initialize class alation.shims.HiveShimsBase$HiveConfShimBase”. As a temporary workaround, this can be addressed by restarting the Taskserver and rerunning MDE.

  • Sybase IQ queries that contain inline comments are not imported via QLI.

  • Customizable Homepage does not have a special icon for Dataflow Objects.

  • In Compose, the download of Excel live reports fails after encryption key rotation.

  • AWS Databricks: queries are not displayed on the Queries tab after QLI on a new Alation instance after an initial QLI was run for an AWS Databricks source. To troubleshoot, the Kvstore component must be restarted.

  • A few known limitations with synonym extraction