Configure Lineage

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The OCF connector for Qlik Cloud automatically calculates lineage information during metadata extraction. Table-level and Column-level lineage is supported by the connector. You also have the ability to configure cross-system lineage to generate lineage between your Qlik Cloud BI source and RDBMS data sources. The following RDBMS sources are supported by the connector for cross-system lineage:

  • Snowflake

  • Microsoft SQL Server

To enable cross-system lineage the “BI connection info” needs to be configured on the corresponding source database’s Additional Data Source Connections page.

Parameter

Description

Default value

Example value

Additional data source connections

The BI source connection that is connecting to an RDBMS source

No default value

company.snowflakecomputing.com:443

Below are the steps to configure the Additional data source connections:

Older Alation UI

  1. After metadata extraction has taken place, navigate to your previously-configured Qlik Cloud BI source in Alation.

    • Above the list of folders displayed, select the DataSources tab

    • Chooose a data source from the list

    • For the chosen data source click the Connections tab

    • Copy the displayed Database Connection string (example: company.snowflakecomputing.com:443) including any port number.

      ../../../_images/QlikCloudLineageConnections1.png

  2. Identify the relevant data source - Snowflake in this example - and open this data source’s General Settings Tab and paste the value from Step 1 into the below field. The UI may vary depending on the Alation version.

    ../../../_images/QlikCloudLineageConnections2.png

  3. Ensure Enable Automatic Lineage Generation is checked.

  4. Rerun the Qlik metadata extraction job.

New Alation UI

  1. Navigate to your Qlik Cloud connector settings and click the Lineage Settings tab.

  2. Under Manage Connections click the Add Upstream Connections button.

  3. Choose the upstream data source(s) from the list displayed on the right (example: a Snowflake database) and Click Save.

    ../../../_images/QlikCloudLineageConnections3.png

  4. Click Generate Lineage.

Alation will then generate lineage data revealing the pathways between the data source tables and the Qlik reports. Lineage will continue to be collected during subsequent metadata extraction (MDE) jobs.