Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Enhanced Connector Enhanced connectors add extended capabilities and require a separate entitlement in addition to your Alation platform license.

To get the enhanced connector for Universal BI, contact the Connectors team at Alation.

The enhanced Universal BI OCF Connector loads metadata from BI sources into Alation, overcoming challenges such as networking blocks and rigid file formats. It supports integration through CSV files from external systems or cloud storage, providing a secure, efficient way to manage complex data environments.

The Universal BI OCF generates BI data sources in Alation by reading metadata from CSV files. You control how the file’s columns are managed in Alation using standard OCF settings.

With the Universal BI OCF, you can capture key technical metadata, including:

• BI Source name

• Folders

• Reports

• Fields

Team

The following administrators are required to install this connector:

• BI Admin:

  • Provides the Universal BI CSV file post extraction

• Alation Server Admin:

  • Installs the connector

  • Creates a Universal BI source

  • Configures the Universal BI source

Scope

The table below describes which metadata objects are extracted by this connector and which operations are supported.

Feature	Scope	Availability
Metadata extraction	Extract the metadata in Object Mapping	Yes
Report Lineage	Intra-system lineage	Yes
Cross-System Lineage	End-to-end lineage at the system level from the RDBMS data source to the BI data source	Manual
Column Level Lineage	Trace columns across data sources in the Lineage tab of a catalogued object	Manual
Object Usage Statistics	Popularity of values	No
Permission Mirroring	Replicate permissions into Alation	No
Report/Dashboard Previews	Image Previews or Report thumbnails	No
Link to Source System	Navigation	No
Selective Extraction	Ability to apply filters on Organization	No
Full Extraction	Ability to run full extraction on the CSV instance	Yes

Object Mapping

The diagram and table below show how each extracted object maps to an object in Alation.