Release Notes 2023.3 (General Availability)

Note

The release notes on this page reflect changes to the Alation application. If you’re looking for OCF connector release notes, jump to OCF Connector Release Notes.

RELEASE 2023.3.5.2

build 17.5.2.73574

Released April 26, 2024

Note

This release is available for customer-managed (on-premise) Alation instances.

  • Addressed an issue of performance degradation during search data ingestion. This issue was caused by a recently added attribute in one of the functions that led to a large number of unnecessary queries against the Alation database. The issue was addressed by query optimization and enhanced caching. (AL-154844)

RELEASE 2023.3.5.1

build 17.5.1.68029

Released March 11, 2024

Note

This release is available for customer-managed (on-premise) Alation instances.

  • Resolved a deadlock issue in uWSGI worker threads introduced by the upgrade from Python 3.6 to Python 3.9. The deadlock occurred when threads loaded a Django application alongside the Python module traceback. The issue was addressed by disabling traceback by default. (AL-145955)

  • Fixed an issue in the rosemeta_allvisits table where updates for conversation visits were not accurately reflected. Enhanced the logging mechanism for tracking visits to the conversation page in the public.visits table within Alation Analytics. This fix ensures that all user visits to conversations are properly logged and updated. (AL-142986)

RELEASE 2023.3.5

build 17.5.0.64295

Released February 6, 2024

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

The Connect Platform

Catalog Visibility Management for BI Sources

To provide better control over who can view BI sources in the catalog, we’ve introduced the ability to manage catalog visibility for BI sources and a function of the BI Server Admin, similar to that of the Data Source Admin for RDBMS data sources. Users with the Server Admin role can grant the BI Server Admin access to themselves and other users. A BI Server Admin can access the settings of a BI source and configure its visibility on the new Access tab:

  • Public BI Server—Visible to all catalog users

  • Private BI Server—Visible to specific catalog users or groups designated by a BI Server Admin

By default, a newly created BI source is public. (AL-124106)

Alation Agent Polling Mode

Alation Cloud Service on Cloud-Native Architecture

Alation Agent can now be configured to use polling. In the polling mode, users will see an informational message that some operations may take longer time to finish. The Agent dashboard in Admin Settings > Manage Connectors will indicate whether the Agent is configured to use the standard or the polling mode. (AL-138169)

Alation Public APIs

Access to the Custom Field Value API for Catalog Admins

Alation users with the Catalog Admin role can now use the Custom Field Value API endpoints. (AL-140940)

Ability to Manage BI Source Visibility via API

You can now make BI servers private or public when creating a BI server and updating a BI server with the API. When getting a BI server, the response indicates whether the server is private. This API accompanies the new feature Catalog Visibility Management for BI Sources. (AL-142964)

New API to Manage Data Source Connections for a BI Server Source

Added new API endpoints allowing users to get, create, update, and delete the data source connections information for a BI server source. (AL-141305)

Terms API Can Filter by Glossary and Provides More Info

When retrieving terms via API, you can now filter terms by which glossary they belong to. The response includes which glossary the terms belong to, any custom fields associated with the term, and the ID of the term’s template. (AL-111871)

Fixes to Data Dictionary API and Articles API

  • Fixed a bug in the Data Dictionary API where a trailing slash was included in the documentation for the GET endpoint, which was causing API calls to fail. (AL-142026)

  • The Articles API now returns the correct error code (401) when a call is made with an invalid token. Previously it returned the 403 error code. (AL-134789)

User Management

User Sign-Up Moderation Enabled by Default

Previously, user sign-up moderation was disabled by default on customer-managed and Alation Cloud Service instances that are not on the cloud-native architecture. From this release onward, user sign-up moderation is enabled by default on all new installations, both customer-managed and Alation Cloud Service, and on the cloud instances that are newly migrated to Alation Cloud Service on the cloud-native architecture.

On subsequent upgrades, the user sign-up moderation setting will be preserved.

Important

If your current instance is customer-managed or an Alation Cloud Service instance that hasn’t been migrated to the cloud-native architecture yet and you have never changed your user sign-up moderation preferences, then expect this setting to become enabled by default after updating to 2023.3.5.

If you’ve changed this setting before, your previous configuration will be preserved.

We recommend that user sign-up moderation should be enabled by default on all instance types to adhere to security best practices. Please review your user sign-up moderation settings after updating to 2023.3.5 and update the setting as per your organization’s policies. You can find the user sign-up moderation settings under Admin Settings > Authentication > User Signup Moderation Preference. (AL-141813)

SCIM Integration Enhancements

We introduced a new read-only attribute groups in the GET request response to the SCIM user detail request. The SCIM user endpoints for retrieving either a list of users or a specific user will now return the group information in the response as a read-only attribute. This makes Alation’s SCIM API compliant with RFC 7643 and allows supporting custom-developed workflows that rely on this attribute. (AL-140681)

Renaming of Glossary Terms Feature Flags

In preparation for the public preview of the Documentation Hub feature that is coming up in the major 2024.1 release (March 2024), the feature flags enabling the Glossary Terms feature have been renamed in Admin Settings > Feature Configuration:

  • Glossary Terms Setup has been renamed to Document Hubs 1: Setup (disabled by default)

  • Glossary Terms GA has been renamed to Document Hubs 2: Show Glossary Hub (disabled by default)

  • Glossary Terms Performance has been renamed to Improvement Document Hubs 4: Performance Improvement (enabled by default)

  • Glossary Terms Total Count has been renamed to Document Hubs 5: Document Total Count (disabled by default)

In addition, there is a new feature flag Document Hubs 3: Enable Hub Creation (Public Preview) (disabled by default). Customers are not advised to enable this feature in 2023.3.5. The enablement guidelines will be available with the Document Hub Public Preview information. (AL-133300)

OCF Connectors

Updates to the Open Connector Framework (OCF) connectors are released every week. See OCF Connector Release Notes for detailed information on the connector updates in the month of January 2024.

Some January highlights include:

New Connector Releases

Connector Settings User Experience Redesign

We’ve completely redesigned the user experience for Alation admins setting up OCF sources for the connectors listed below. Now, the configuration parameters are organized by steps, with new validation features added, such as testing connection and permissions to access the metadata. The extraction process has been fortified, and more clarifications and troubleshooting tips are now available in the user interface in case of extraction or ingestion errors.

Other Updates

Cross-Data-Source Lineage for MicroStrategy BI Sources

Previously, only BI lineage was supported by the MicroStrategy OCF connector. Cross-system table-level lineage was not supported due to unavailability of the host and port information via the MicroStrategy REST API. As a result, Alation couldn’t trace a report or document back to the upstream data source.

Now, we leverage the Alation API to input host and port for the data sources where it is not available via the MicroStrategy API, providing end-to-end table-level lineage for in-memory cubes.

OCF Tableau Enhancements

Native to OCF migration is available for Tableau sources:

  • The migration is enabled through both the user interface and a curation migration script.

  • The script now has improved logging.

OCF Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.12 Certification

The OCF connector for Oracle has been quality-certified for Oracle E-Business Suite version 12.2.12. (AL-133313)

Alation Agent Certification with Compose for More Connectors

Compose is now available for the following connectors installed on Alation Agent (AL-139438):

  • OCF connector for Impala on CDH

  • OCF connector for Impala CDP

Bug Fixes

Data Dictionary

  • Fixed an issue where the field editing history is not updated when a user updates fields using a data dictionary upload. Now, the field editing history for a field appears in the catalog after uploading the data dictionary. (AL-141644)

  • Previously, while parsing the data dictionary header, the grammar was restricted to only ASCII characters, so Unicode characters were rejected by throwing an error message. We have fixed this behavior by modifying the grammar to include Unicode characters too. For example, now the upload data dictionary feature works for Japanese characters and other Unicode characters. (AL-141572)

  • Fixed an issue where the data dictionary upload using a CSV file failed in the Firefox browser with the error Invalid file format. Only CSV or TSV files are supported. Now, users can upload both TSV and CSV data dictionary files on any version of Firefox, Chrome, and other supported browsers. (AL-141001)

Alation Analytics

  • Increased the consumer timeout for RabbitMQ to two hours to ensure that ETL does not truncate large tables. (AL-135579)

  • Any flag object extracted into Alation Analytics from the Alation database with the is_for_temp_object column set, will be skipped by the queries. Going forward, we are excluding temporary objects from being stored in Alation Analytics as they do not reference objects stored in the Alation database. (AL-135191)

  • Ensured that Alation Analytics now does not use the Docker 4.7 update instructions alone in Dockerfiles by updating the base image to use a newer version of RHEL 8 which doesn’t have the update command alone as instruction. (AL-133173)

  • Added a new column groupprofile_id to the alation_group table. This table will hold the ID of the group profile related to the authentication group. This will ensure consistency between Alation Analytics and the custom fields in the catalog UI, like the Steward field. (AL-128206)

  • Fixed the issue that caused the following error during ETL: Failed to insert records into stg_bi_datasource_columns due to psycopg2 error: null value in column “bi_ds_fp” of relation “stg_bi_datasource_columns” violates not-null constraint. Added a not-null constraint to the bi_ds_fp column in the (stg_)*bi_datasource_columns table. (AL-127789)

  • Added support for null values in the ts_started, ts_updated, and other fields to prevent failures of the ETL job StewardshipBulkActionTransformJob. (AL-137837)

Governance

  • Fixed an issue causing pod eviction. Optimized memory usage by the Celery service of the downstream MDE jobs for OCF Snowflake data sources that handles ingestion of Snowflake tags and tag links. (AL-140666)

  • Fixed an issue where workflow reviewers were unable to suggest changes, receiving an error message: Your suggestion couldn’t be created at this time. The feature is disabled or you do not have sufficient permissions. (AL-133561)

  • Fixed an issue where an initial extraction from a BI source did not display some of the extracted reports in the user interface, with those reports appearing in the catalog automatically a few days later. The issue was caused by a Celery queue for long-running tasks. Addressed by optimizing how processing queues are organized for long-running stewardship tasks. (AL-127200)

  • Optimized the downstream jobs that run during MDE for OCF Snowflake data sources. In addition, the job that handles the clean-up of deleted Snowflake tags will now skip the deletion of the Snowflake tag custom field if the new alation_conf flag alation.feature_flags.disable_snowflake_customfield_deletion is enabled (disabled by default). This change decreases memory usage during MDE and shortens MDE duration. (AL-140666)

Other Fixes

  • Fixed an issue that prevented the installation and upgrade on FIPS-enabled operating systems. (AL-135158)

  • Fixed an issue where the user moderation setting became enabled after each Alation upgrade since migrating the instance to the cloud-native architecture. Now, the preference set by a Server Admin will be preserved. (AL-137401)

  • Addressed a security vulnerability in the Golang packages by upgrading to their latest version. (AL-143662)

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.4.1

build 17.4.1.63336

Released January 24, 2024

Note

This patch release is for Alation Cloud Service instances on the cloud-native architecture.

This patch includes enhancements to the Alation Analytics offering on the cloud-native architecture. It isn’t universally available in all AWS regions. If your Alation Cloud Service instance is not planned for this update, the patch may not be applicable to your instance. (AL-139775)

RELEASE 2023.3.4

build 17.4.0.60909

Released January 4, 2024

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

Alation Anywhere

Alation Anywhere for Microsoft Teams (Cloud Native Architecture only)

Microsoft Teams application users can now unfurl a conversation link from Alation. Users can quickly start a new conversation from Microsoft Teams per a specific object, reply to a conversation, or mark the conversation as resolved. (AL-124015)

Alation Analytics

Alation Analytics Dashboard Improvements

  • On the ETL Status Dashboard an admin can mark all the ETL failure messages as read using the Mark all as read button. In addition, an admin can refresh the ETL Status Dashboard without reloading the tab using the Refresh Table button. (AL-138679)

  • On the Top Contributors Dashboard, if a user no longer exists in Alation but does exist in the Alation Analytics data source, then an asterisk will be appended to the user’s name in the Top Contributors Dashboard. (AL-138679)

Enable Third-Party Metrics in Alation

Naming and default values for feature flags that enable outgoing requests to Pendo and other third-party analytics tools have been made more consistent. This is enabled by default. Each third-party analytics tool has a dedicated feature flag that customer admins can enable or disable from the feature flags admin page. (AL-140552)

Alation Analytics Backup and Restore Improvements

Improved overall performance of Alation Analytics backup and restore. (AL-133755)

Improvements to Alation Analytics for BI Access

  • Fixed an issue where the initial Alation Analytics data replication to Snowflake failed for certain tables which had the NULL value among the values in the array-type columns. (AL-133055)

  • The script copy_data_to_snowflake.py now accepts the arguments which can be used to copy only the required tables. The time_period table is now also part of the initial data copy process to Snowflake. (AL-141482)

Compose Improvements

Ensured that the Compose Desktop menu item Visit Help Center Cloud Authorization redirects to the help center page as intended. (AL-137205)

Lineage: Alphabetical Sorting of Columns in Compound View

The column objects in the Compound Layout of lineage charts are now sorted alphabetically. This sorting facilitates tracking of data movement between objects in both full and column-level lineage views. (AL-137732)

Cloud Authorization

SCIM Token Generation Warning

Users will now receive a warning before generating a new SCIM token when a previous token already exists (expired or not). The warning will indicate that the previous token will be invalidated. (AL-138329)

Data Dictionary Improvements

Upload Data Dictionary improvements include: (AL-138675) - You can now link Terms and Policies to data objects using Upload Dictionary. Terms and Policies links will also be downloaded in the object set field as part of the data dictionary file.

  • Period characters are now supported. The downloaded dictionary will have key_name quoted as required by the upload feature when names contain a period character.

  • Non-admin users can now access upload dictionary without a page refresh.

  • Enhanced object reference presentation in the data dictionary preview table. Previously, the title appeared as the text of the link within the object reference column. Now, when the key is available, it displays as link text; however, if the key is unavailable, the object’s title will be shown as text in the link.

  • Data Dictionary preview is now able to render fields with a comma in names.

Glossary and Articles

Users will now see the Stewards field on all Glossary details pages. (AL-133299)

Governance Improvements

Policy ingested timestamp for policies that were ingested using the Native Snowflake Connector will be back-filled with the created timestamp. (AL-138443)

Group-based Homepages

Catalog admins can assign a homepage to one or more user groups. (AL-134390)

  • Users that are part of the assigned group(s) that have a homepage will be able to view this homepage when they log in to the application.

  • Users that are already using role-based homepage associations will automatically be migrated to the group-based scheme.

  • If a user is part of multiple groups that have different homepages assigned, the user will be able to choose a preferred homepage.

  • When a user is not part of any group that has a homepage assigned or they haven’t chosen a preferred homepage, they will be shown the Alation default homepage.

Search Enhancements

Automated the task to analyze and update search index data. The task is configurable using alation_conf (to enable, disable, and schedule the task). (AL-129324)

APIs

OCF Data Sources API Compose Support

Enhanced the API to be able to set up compose for data sources using OCF connectors. (AL-130098)

Bug Fixes

Cloud Authorization: Bypass User Email Confirmation for SSO-based Authentication Flows

A recent update from Python 3.6 to 3.9 caused empty passwords to be handled differently; as a result, users or requests provisioned in the system without a password and not a confirmed email address were redirected to the verify email page even if the password is not required for those users (like in the case of SCIM). Now the system will set non-empty passwords for all the users during the user creation flows to ensure that users won’t get redirected to verify their email if they are not password users. (AL-139068).

Glossary and Articles

Removed an errant “b” that was prepended to the title slug in Article URLs. (AL-138356)

KVstore Improvements

Some users are affected by a memory hike on the KVstore and need to regularly reboot KVstore. The KVstore has been upgraded to 8.3.2 and will now consume less memory. (AL-142108)

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.3.2

build 17.3.2.58486

Released December 13, 2023

Note

This release is available for customer-managed (on-premise) Alation instances.

  • Fixed an issue that prevented users from connecting to their OCF Impala data sources in Compose after transitioning from the Hive driver to the Cloudera Impala driver within the CDP connector. The corresponding driver in Compose was updated accordingly. Users can now connect and run queries as previously experienced. (AL-138914)

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.3.1

build 17.3.1.58212

Released December 5, 2023

Note

This release is available for Alation Cloud Service instances on the cloud-native architecture.

  • Fixed a bug where a new Python-based wrapper script that was implemented to support additional Datadog features caused a bug which resulted in no logs in Datadog from any of the affected clusters. Now, the log availability in Datadog has been restored. (AL-140466)

RELEASE 2023.3.3

build 17.3.0.57463

Released December 4, 2023

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

Compose

Past Scheduled Executions Dashboard for Admins

A new dashboard is now available as a second tab next to the existing scheduled query admin dashboard that provides a tabular view of past scheduled executions. This feature aims at helping Server Admins understand the patterns of scheduled queries on their instance. They will be able to monitor if any schedules fail, take significant execution time, or were canceled. (AL-128832)

Improved Query Export Scalability

Previously, the Run and Export actions sometimes failed for smaller exports and consistently failed for exports of over 1M records. The Run and Export functionality should now be stable for both small and large exports. (AL-125680)

Data Dictionary Improvements

  • Introduced the feature flag alation.feature_flags.disable_perm_check_on_download_dd to disable permission checks when downloading data dictionaries. Permission checks may take a significant amount of time, which in some cases can delay the delivery of the download URL to users by a few hours. This flag allows disabling the permission checks from the backend. By default, the flag is set to False, which means the Download Dictionary feature will check the permissions and the download option will be available for users with the Composer role and above. Setting this flag to True will disable the permission checks and the Download Dictionary option will only be visible to Catalog Admins and Server Admins. (AL-138107)

  • Data Dictionary download now includes a new column, al_datadict_column_data_type, which contains the data type for each column. This information was previously contained in the al_datadict_item_properties column, but has now been broken out on its own. This column should be considered read-only.

  • Added support for custom field names in upper or mixed case in the data dictionary file. (AL-137003)

  • Added support for custom field names with a comma in headers. (AL-138310)

  • A summary is now displayed for the uploaded dictionary on the Upload Dictionary screen after the upload dictionary process is completed. (AL-136514)

  • The data dictionary upload now accepts the TSV file format. (AL-136379)

  • Previously, we relied on object keys (names) to link objects using object set fields in the upload dictionary flow, which caused some performance challenges and issues identifying the right objects in case of duplicates. To address this, we added support for the object ID in the format objectid | ObjectKey(name). You can now provide the object ID or the name or both to link objects via the dictionary upload. When downloading the data dictionary file, we will include both the object id and the object key for each object set field value. (AL-127462)

Alation Analytics

  • Added a “no special characters” password policy for the Alation Analytics database password: the password can’t contain any special characters. (AL-138780)

  • Now you can skip load tables from the subsequent ETL runs using a new alation_conf flag alation_analytics-v2.etl.skip_load_tables. This setting can unblock all other ETL jobs if some jobs are failing. To add tables to this flag, use the following syntax: alation_conf alation_analytics-v2.etl.skip_load_tables -s '["users", "query"]'. To reset the flag, use the following syntax: alation_conf alation_analytics-v2.etl.skip_load_tables -s '[]'. (AL-128081)

  • Cloud-native architecture The alationanalyticsv2_entitlement_counts table has been renamed to license_usage to more accurately describe its purpose. Additionally, the following measures related to user license consumption have been added to the table:

    • num_licenses—The number of licenses available.

    • pct_utilization—The number of users as a percentage of available licenses.

    • pct_adoption—The number of active users as a percentage of available licenses.

    This table is also now replicated to Alation Analytics on Snowflake. (AL-136878)

    Note

    The license_usage table is populated on Alation instances on Cloud-native architecture only. On customer-managed instances, this table is present but not populated.

Glossary Improvements

The enable_glossary_terms_performance feature flag, which controls the performance enhancement for Glossaries, now defaults to enabled. The flag still remains in the flag list on the Feature Configuration page. If you had previously toggled it on and then off again, it will remain disabled after the upgrade to 2023.3.3. You can manually toggle it back on again to experience a performance improvement. (AL-136812)

Absolute User Session Timeout (Cloud-Native Architecture only)

For security reasons, users will no longer be able to stay logged in for an indefinite period of time. A user session will be terminated forcing the user to re-login once the time limit for session duration is reached. The absolute user session timeout is configurable on the Authentication page of Admin Settings, in the Session Timeout Settings, using the field Maximum Session Duration (in hours). This feature applies only to customers on the cloud-native architecture. (AL-123328)

Lineage

Enhanced Edge Highlighting

Improved user focus and navigation within lineage charts by fading out nodes and paths not directly connected to a selected object’s upstream or downstream paths. This visual enhancement helps users concentrate on the most relevant parts of the lineage. (AL-134668)

Alation API

Custom Field Value APIs

  • Added support for api_resource, api_resource_field, and api_resource_folder object types in the Public Custom Field Value API and Public Custom Field Value Async API (Refer to Custom Field Value Overview on Alation Developer Portal). (AL-134107)

  • Fixed an issue with the Public Custom Field Value API where validation errors were not thrown correctly when using an unsupported object type (AL-134176).

Public API for SCIM Token Generation

  • Added support for the API endpoint for SCIM token operations (Refer to SCIM 2.0 API on Alation Developer Portal). (AL-136805)

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud-native architecture

  • Re-enabled the admin UI for viewing active tasks which was previously disabled when this service launched due to some issues. (AL-124848)

  • The License dashboard page now shows the contract expiration date. Previously, the license expiration date was displayed. In Alation, licenses are renewed every year until the contract expires. (AL-137415)

  • Elasticache is now in use on instances on the cloud-native architecture. Alation components leveraging Elasticache have better performance by storing and retrieving frequently used data within Elasticache. (AL-107135)

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where after the upgrade to 2023.3.1, the query forms user experience for the Viewer role was hampered when the Obfuscate Literals setting was enabled (all literals became unavailable in the query form result). This fix returns query forms behavior to align with the behavior in Compose where a user with run (or edit) permissions on a query would see literals, even when literal obfuscation is turned on, as opposed to a viewer who would not see the literals. A user with only view permissions on a query would not see literals on any Alation page when obfuscation is turned on. (AL-136260)

  • Fixed an issue when the dynamic multi-select widget did not show any error messages on query forms. (AL-137032).

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.2.2

build 17.2.2.66531

Released February 28, 2024

Note

This release is available for customer-managed (on-premise) Alation instances.

  • Resolved a deadlock issue in uWSGI worker threads introduced by the upgrade from Python 3.6 to Python 3.9. The deadlock occurs when a thread attempts to load a Django application alongside the Python module traceback. The issue has been addressed by disabling traceback by default. (AL-145955)

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.2.1

build 17.2.1.55993

Released November 8, 2023

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

  • This patch release includes platform updates to support the enhanced user experience for configuring OCF connector settings, which will be available in upcoming connector releases, starting with the Snowflake OCF connector. (AL-137533)

  • Fixed a Bulk Utility issue where an internal .csv file would become corrupted when users clicked the Download button on the Bulk Utility page. This issue occurred where the initial use of the Bulk Utility involved clicking Download as opposed to selecting a specific saved search, resulting in the generated .csv file missing the Search column and leading to a 500 error. (AL-136141)

RELEASE 2023.3.2

build 17.2.0.55403

Released November 1, 2023

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

Alation Analytics

Basic Authentication for RabbitMQ

The RabbitMQ component of Alation Analytics now requires basic authentication for incoming connections from other Alation components. The RabbitMQ password is auto-generated during the installation or upgrade of Alation Analytics. The password needs to be set in alation_conf via the alation_analytics-v2.rmq.config.password parameter before initializing the Alation Analytics database.

This is a one-time setup for customer-managed instances of Alation. Alation will perform this setup for Alation Cloud Service customers.

Object and User Counts

Object and user counts are now stored in Alation Analytics in the alation_analytics_v2_entitlementcounts table. The table is updated daily with a snapshot of all object usage across an Alation instance.

Note

For Alation Analytics Snowflake users: This data is not replicated into Snowflake in this release, but it will be synced starting from the next release (the November release).

Improvements for Third-Party BI Access via Snowflake

Cloud-native architecture

Snowflake Password Requirements Enforced

If you have a connected Alation Analytics database in Snowflake, your Alation Analytics password must meet Snowflake’s password requirements. This is now enforced in the Alation user interface under Account Settings > DB Connections. To create or update the password for the Alation Analytics data source, users will need to follow certain password policies imposed by Snowflake (a lowercase alphabet, an uppercase, a digit, and the length of eight characters).

Clear Analytics Data - Fixed

The Snowflake database was not getting cleared when clearing up Alation Analytics using the Clear Analytics Data button. Now, the cleaning up of the database will be done asynchronously as part of a Celery task, and the button click will post a message to Celery and return success. (AL-125158)

Alation Anywhere

Alation Anywhere for Slack now shows rich previews for glossaries and terms.

Authentication

We have updated and expanded audit logging for important security-related events, such as updates to authentication settings, authorization changes, and user and group management updates. Authentication logs are written to alation-events.log.

Compose Enhancements

  • You can now sort queries alphabetically by name in ascending and descending order.

  • Compose now deletes blank queries after closing the query tab. In addition, on Sunday, Compose automatically deletes any blank queries from the past week.

  • Embedded queries can now be executed in query forms.

  • When query results are exported or downloaded in any way, Alation logs the event for auditing purposes. The logs are recorded to the alation-events.log file.

  • Fixed an issue where the Connection Settings dialog didn’t open when attempting to run a query with a connection error.

  • The Query API now respects configuration settings that prevent query results from being exported or downloaded.

  • Multi-select parameters in query forms can now have their value options defined with a pre-query. Once the pre-query has been run, query form users can select values based on the results of the pre-query. For usability purposes, pre-query results have an upper limit of 100 result items.

Connected Sheets OAuth Enhancements

  • Roles are kept separate for the username and SSO credentials so users will not see roles auto-populated inconsistently between the different credential forms.

  • Error messages have been moved to the top so that they are visible without having to scroll.

  • A “Connected” badge was added showing the credential that is being used.

  • The credentials form now automatically expands and collapses.

Governance

Data Dictionary upload has a new, streamlined interface and now runs asynchronously. Users should avoid quoting header names containing space characters to avoid issues with well-known CSV editors.

Data Dictionary download now includes a new first column, al_datadict_item_properties, which contains object types and object IDs for each object in the data dictionary. When updating an RDBMS object with a data dictionary, this column should not be modified. When migrating curation information from one instance to another, this column should be removed, as the object IDs may not be correct for the target instance.

Install and Upgrade

  • On customer-managed (on-premise) instances of Alation, you can now place the internal Alation database on the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance in your own AWS account. This capability provides the benefits of RDS to self-managed customers.

  • Added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.x, Ubuntu Linux 22, and Debian Linux 11 as base operating systems for installation of the on-premise Alation software package.

  • The legacy tab—Software Updates—has been removed from Admin Settings.

Lineage

Asset Grouping Icons for Datasource Cluster Nodes

Data source logos are now shown in the Compound Layout lineage view for each data source group. Generic data source logos are used for virtual data sources and Custom DBs. (AL-128656)

Search

Synonym Search On Cloud-Native Architecture

Synonym search is now supported in the cloud-native architecture.

New Public API for the Management of Synonyms

A new public API has been added for the management of synonyms so that customers can customize synonym terms in their catalog searches. For more information, refer to Search Overview on Alation’s Developer Portal.

User Management: Generate SCIM Tokens in the User Interface

Server Admins can now generate SCIM tokens on the Admin Settings > Authentication page, making it easier to maintain the connection between your identity provider and Alation. Server Admins will get alerts about SCIM token expiration. Email alerts will occur 15 days before expiration, 1 day before, on the day of expiration, and the day after expiration. Server Admins will also see a banner appear in the Alation interface 15 days before the token expires.

Connect Platform

Zero Touch Agent - Downloadable Installers through Public API

Installer packages for the Alation Agent can now be downloaded programmatically through the public Alation Agent API.

OCF Connectors

HDFS OCF Connector—New!

The HDFS OCF connector is now generally available (GA).

MicroStrategy OCF Connector—New!

MicroStrategy OCF connector is now generally available (GA). The MicroStrategy OCF connector supports TLS and other features based on MicroStrategy REST APIs.

Salesforce OCF Connector—Limited Availability

Limited availability release of the Salesforce OCF connector which would be replacing the custom DB connector.

  • Known issue: The OAuth support for MDE requires manual token refresh upon expiration.

Bug Fixes for Multiple OCF Connectors

  • Column profiling: Fixed a profiling error raised when profiling a column with more than 2,147,483,647 rows (AL-130007). Applies to OCF connectors:

    • AWS Databricks OCF connector

    • Azure Databricks OCF connector

    • Redshift OCF connector

  • The JDBC URI is auto-updated to have useNativeQuery=0 if not given in the URI. This fixes custom query sampling errors (AL-129772). Applies to OCF connectors:

    • AWS Databricks OCF connector

    • Azure Databricks OCF connector

    • Databricks Unity Catalog OCF connector

    • Databricks Unity Catalog OCF connector

  • Removed the jtds prefix appended in sqlserverazure in the connector code (AL-134059). Applies to OCF connectors:

    • Azure SQL DB OCF connector

    • SQL Server OCF connector

Athena OCF Connector

  • Getting query string from Batch API using query execution ID. (AL-127679)

  • Removed the ORDER BY clause from the column profile queries (stats). (AL-133322)

AWS Glue OCF Connector

Upgraded to the latest SDK and passing the Alation compatible version. (AL-132242)

Azure Blob Storage OCF Connector

Azure Service Principal-based authentication feature is supported from Alation version 2023.3.1. (AL-119081, AL-133846)

Denodo OCF Connector

Fixed selective extraction and now the connector filters tables and columns based on the selected schema. (AL-126061)

EMR Presto OCF Connector

Fixed an issue with dynamic sampling taking user credentials from the General Settings page. (AL-131731)

Google BigQuery OCF Connector

Fixed an issue with child statements of create procedure query not being parsed. (AL-128150)

Redshift OCF Connector

  • We need to check the limit while accumulating/appending the string instead of at the end of the sequence to avoid unnecessary processing. (AL-133320)

  • Removed temporary instance profile option from the General Settings page. (AL-130294)

Snowflake OCF Connector

  • Fixed extraction queries which caused an issue when we don’t have a catalog name in the JDBC URI and the selected Include/Exclude filter option was all schemas except. (AL-133694)

  • Snowflake has custom streamer class for filter extraction and that doesn’t handle validation exception similar to SDK’s streamer class. As part of the fix we added catch block to handle validation exception. (AL-134421)

Starburst Trino OCF Connector

Fixed an issue with dynamic sampling taking user credentials from general settings page. (AL-134314)

Teradata OCF Connector

  • Introduced the Extract Schemas From DBASE setting, enabled by default, allowing schema extraction from DBC.Dbase or DBC.DatabasesV based on permissions, providing a mechanism for scenarios with limited table access. In the absence of this support, MDE was failing if the service account did not have permissions for DBC.Databasesv. (AL-133434)

Tableau OCF Connector

Popularity for the Workbook and Report/View objects are now supported in Alation when using the Tableau OCF Connector.

Vertica OCF Connector

Made a modification of the grammar type from ANSI to VERTICA. Previously, when the ANSI grammar type was in use, certain SQL queries, such as SELECT * FROM TABLE LIMIT 10;, didn’t undergo proper parsing by Alation during QLI. With this fix, these types of queries now undergo successful parsing without encountering any errors. (AL-129496)

Bug Fixes

Governance

Revamped Dictionary Upload Flow: More performant and robust data dictionary upload flow is now enabled by default on all environments. (AL-134121)

Snowflake Tag Fixes for Policy Center

  • Snowflake tags are removed from data dictionary during download as we do not support persisting tag value updates via data dictionary. (AL-131699)

  • For the native Snowflake connector, the tooltip text for custom fields wasn’t getting populated correctly. This has now been fixed for OCF as well. (AL-130336)

  • In Snowflake, tags can have allowed_values set for them (see Object Tagging in Snowflake documentation). Previously, during MDE, the values in a tag’s allowed_values field were not populated as Custom Fields. However, when tags were attached to objects with a value, those values got populated. Now, MDE is fixed to get the allowed_values of Snowflake tags as Custom Fields values. (AL-130309)

Term & Glossaries

  • Fixed an issue causing corruption of article snapshots when articles are edited using Bulk Utility. (AL-133010)

  • Fixed an issue that resulted in a new row when copying and pasting into a table within an article. (AL-133281)

User Management

  • Suspending users flow is optimized to clean up the active session data in a background task. In some situations, there are 3-4M session entries that previously caused the 504 timeouts. While the background task sweeps and cleans up sessions, a middleware change further blocks these users and prevents their logins for security. (AL-122130)

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.1.2

build 17.1.2.54864

Released October 25, 2023

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

  • In a recent update of Datadog Agent, a configuration change was omitted. This resulted in email alerts being sent every 15 seconds, which led to an excessive volume of notifications for Alation administrators. With this fix, email alerts will be sent based on your configuration in alation_conf, ensuring that their frequency aligns with your expectations. (AL-134151)

PATCH RELEASE 2023.3.1.1

build 17.1.1.54419

Released October 20, 2023

Note

This release is available for Alation Cloud Service instances on the cloud-native architecture.

  • Fixed an issue related to the Okta SCIM integration with Alation. Previously, if a user was deleted from the Okta SCIM app and subsequently re-added, their reactivation in Alation did not occur as expected. The issue was indicated by the following error in the scim-debug.log file: Exception - InternalServer: Unexpected error in updating SCIM user with id <…>. With this fix, users who are removed and then re-added to the SCIM app in Okta will now be automatically re-provisioned and re-activated in Alation. (AL-134886)

RELEASE 2023.3.1

build 17.1.0.52371

Released October 5, 2023

Note

This release is available for all Alation instance types: customer-managed (on-premise) and Alation Cloud Service.

Compose

Granular Download and Export Permissions

Introduced user and group-level permissions for downloading and exporting query results to ensure that only authorized users and groups can export and download the data. Previously, Data Source Admins could enable or disable the Export and Download feature for all users of a data source. Now, they can select individual users and/or groups and grant them the ability to export and download. The access settings are available:

  • On the Compose tab of the Settings page for an OCF data source

  • On the General Settings tab of the Settings page for a native data source or Custom DB.

Query Export Alerts

Added status alerts for the Export and Download feature in Compose. Compose will show an alert if a download gets stuck or cannot be completed. You will also be informed about the progress status (number of rows downloaded so far). This feature can be enabled from the Compose preferences.

Ability to Disable Automatic Connections to Data Sources

Server Admins can now disable automatic connections to data sources in Compose. With automatic connections disabled, Compose won’t use the expired credentials to make connections automatically and cause the data source to lock up the account.

Sort Query Groups

Users can now apply sorting to query groups.

Multiple Compose Bug Fixes

See Compose Bug Fixes below.

Search

Alation now searches for matches across all text fields (picker, multi-picker, rich text custom fields) on term tables.

Governance

Data Dictionary download now includes a new first column, al_datadict_item_properties, which contains object types and object IDs for each object in the data dictionary. When updating an RDBMS object with a data dictionary, this column should not be modified. When migrating curation information from one instance to another, this column should be removed, as the object IDs may not be correct for the target instance.

Connect Platform

Query Log Ingestion Pipeline Improvements

Stabilized the performance of query log ingestion (QLI) by restricting a single QLI job to run for seven days or less. Multiple QLI jobs can still be submitted to account for more days as an alternative. If a QLI job is submitted for more than seven days, an error message will be displayed in the QLI job submission UI and referenced in the QLI job history page and the job will not run until resolved. If any exceptions are required to loosen these restrictions and submitting multiple QLI jobs is not an option, please request an exception via a Support ticket.

OCF Connectors

Tableau OCF Connector

Version 1.6.7.6780

  • Removed the settings Disable auto pagination, Number of workbooks to return per request, Number of datasources returned per request, Number of connections to return per request, and Number of fields/columns to return per request from the connector settings page. Pagination is now always enabled. (AL-131539, AL-129442)

  • Added the ability to enable or disable the extraction of auto-generated embedded data sources (Enable MDE for auto-generated embedded data sources). (AL-132136, AL-125129)

  • The REST API calls will now all have a timeout to prevent latency issues leading to extremely long extraction times. (AL-129663)

  • Fixed an issue with extraction where users observed duplicate and stale objects in the catalog. Duplicates or stale objects will no longer be created. (AL-129311)

  • Fixed an issue where a failure in the popularity API request led to an error during extraction. Added logic to correctly handle empty popularity API responses. (AL-130126)

Databricks on AWS OCF Connector

Version 2.1.3.5925

Upgraded the Databricks driver in the connector to the the latest version. In this driver version, the JDBC URI protocol was changed from spark:// to databricks://. (AL-123135)

Databricks on Google Cloud OCF Connector

Version 2.0.0.5925

Upgraded the Databricks driver in the connector to the the latest version. In this driver version, the JDBC URI protocol was changed from spark:// to databricks://. (AL-123141)

Databricks Unity Catalog OCF Connector

Version 2.0.4.6984

Fixed an issue where a table that was previously extracted and later excluded from extraction, was still displayed, but with the Deleted from the data source message. Selective extraction now properly filters catalogs, schemas, tables, and columns, and no longer contains objects from catalogs and schemas that are not included in extraction. (AL-126886)

Amazon S3 OCF Connector

Version 3.8.6.6821

Fixed an issue with extracting folders that don’t have a name, for example, folders that are stored with a / and no explicit name. Added the ability to extract the S3 folders with no name but having contents. Previously, we didn’t show such folders on Alation. (AL-128411)

Azure Blob Storage OCF Connector

Version 2.4.1.7072

Added support for authentication with an Azure service principal (Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2). (AL-119081)

Teradata OCF Connector

Version 1.0.9.6817

Fixed an issue with dynamic sampling and profiling where it didn’t work when the Use LDAP Server checkbox was selected in General Settings. Dynamic sampling and profiling now works with LDAP authentication. (AL-131715)

SQL Server OCF Connector

Version 1.3.5.6961

Fixed an issue with the Upload Data feature where it failed with the error The uploaded data does not seem to match the selected table. Added support for the data types nchar, nvarchar, and timestamp, which had not been available previously. All built-in data types of SQL server that are normalized to boolean, string, integer, float, date, time, and timestamp are now supported. (AL-129508)

Enterprise Readiness

Elasticsearch Upgrade

Upgraded the Elasticsearch component to a newer version to leverage support for semantic search.

Python Upgrade

Upgraded the internal Python language libraries to a newer version to take advantage of the new, more secure, functionality.

Bug Fixes

Compose

  • The parameter Always show column names in the Results section of Compose Settings previously only applied to query runs. Now, it has been extended to query exports. (AL-127968)

  • Previously, changing the query owner of a scheduled query didn’t change the owner of the schedule. After this fix, a change to query ownership will also change the ownership of the schedule. (AL-130402)

  • Fixed an issue where My Queries, Drafts, and By Query Group lists on the Open Query screen did not include the unpublished queries that a user had access to. Now, users will see all of their queries, including unpublished ones in these query lists. (AL-124378)

  • Fixed an issue where the Password field in the Connection Settings dialog was not clear when users tried to create a second new connection. (AL-101879)

  • Fixed an issue where the Format action could break the formatting for some queries. In query variables, both keys and values are now permitted to be case-insensitive. (AL-94131)

  • Fixed an issue with the OAuth authentication for OCF Snowflake data sources where the Connection Settings dialog showed the Authentication Successful message when the access and refresh tokens were expired. Now, the Authentication Failure message will be correctly displayed when token expiration happens. (AL-100851)

  • Removed the OAuth authentication status notifications that were shown in a slide-out in the bottom right corner of the Compose user interface. OAuth authentication status messages will be now displayed in the Connection Settings dialog. (AL-126545)

  • Fixed an issue where HTML sanitation incorrectly recognized some HTML tags within SQL. Only script tags will now be sanitized. (AL-131716)

  • Fixed an issue where query form results did not obfuscate literals while the data source had the Obfuscate Literals setting enabled. (AL-115548)

  • Fixed a bug in the Compose user interface where un-publishing and then re-publishing a query caused the corresponding query version to appear as a parentless version in Version History. (AL-36005)

  • Fixed an issue where a query schedule could be saved without providing the connection information. (AL-121813)

  • Fixed an issue where the Conversation pull-out icon did not appear on the query form catalog page. (AL-133248)

  • Fixed an issue with the Load More button for queries on the Queries tab under schema and table catalog objects where pressing this button did not upload more queries into the interface. (AL-131497)

  • When the service account is configured with key pair authentication for Snowflake, the data associated with it is being used for Compose connections. The key pair parameters should not be used for Compose connections and the change in this ticket does an extra check to ensure this. (AL-128080)

Alation Analytics

  • Fixed an issue where the ts_updated column was not updated when custom templates were modified. (AL-114792)

  • Fixed an issue where the current timezone of a query schedule was not extracted into Alation Analytics. Now you’ll be able to query the timezone of the scheduled query from the Alation Analytics data source. This can help in estimating the exact runs of the cron jobs handling the queries. To retrieve this information, make use of the schedule_cron_tz column in the query table. (AL-119622)

Glossaries and Articles

  • Fixed a performance issue where the loading of linked terms on the glossary details page took excessive time. The fix ensures much quicker responses to hydrate both Glossary Hub and Glossary Term tables. It is controlled by the alation_conf parameter alation.feature_flags.enable_glossary_terms_performance that is disabled by default and needs to be enabled if you are affected by this issue. (AL-115695)

  • Fixed an issue where the object titles mentioned in the description were missing on the hover-over the Columns field on catalog pages of table objects. Now, the full description will be displayed. (AL-129977)

  • Previously, there was a page length control on the Term Glossary membership dialog. It defaulted to 5, and could be adjusted to show up to 25 glossaries per page. From Alation version 2023.1.6, this page size control was no longer visible, but the default page size of five could not be changed. Now, fixed: the page length can again be controlled by users in the user interface. (AL-132113)

  • Fixed an issue with Bulk Utility where domains with an ampersand (&) in the name were not migrated. Alation now allows the domains with an ampersand to be successfully applied to terms during migration from articles using Bulk Utility. (AL-132214)

  • Fixed an issue where the rich text editor didn’t retain formatting. Users can now choose if they want to keep the formatting from outlook or discard it. (AL-132418)

  • Fixed an issue where suspended users were not displayed as GONE on the Access dialog for object-level permissions–⁠enabled objects. (AL-133111)

Data Dictionary

  • Users will now be able to upload a data dictionary file containing rich text fields without experiencing the Unexpected Error caused by the presence of rich text fields in the data dictionary file while generating a preview. Additionally, we introduced the alation_conf parameter hydrate_rich_text_field_values_on_data_dictionary_preview_ui (disabled by default). It controls whether the existing values of rich text fields should be hydrated by showing the corresponding display text for each of the mentions on the preview screen. (AL-129392)

Other Bug Fixes

  • Addressed an issue where the Subdomains field was not available for addition to the domain template after it was deleted. Alation now prevents users from removing of the Subdomains and Domain Users components from the domain template. (AL-127364)

  • Made a performance enhancement to speed up retrieval of object sets. You can still return to the previous way of retrieving object sets by disabling the alation_conf flag DEV_enable_object_set_value_visible_v2 (enabled by default). (AL-112701)

  • Fixed an issue where file system object count reporting query used up lot of disk space. Optimized the query to avoid excessive disk usage. (AL-132803)

  • Fixed a behavior where LMS history files were deleted when any error happened during processing. (AL-132602)

RELEASE 2023.3.0 - General Availability

build 17.0.0.49181

Released September 5, 2023

Alation Agent

Alation Agent Notifications

Once a user subscribes to Alation Agent notifications, the user will receive email alerts 60, 45, 30, 20, 10, 5 and 1 day before the certificate expires. If the certificate expires due inaction, daily reminders will be sent to ensure action is taken.

Alation Agent Diagnostic Tool

The Agent diagnostic tool allows users to troubleshoot connectivity issues between the Alation Agent and Alation. It runs a series of diagnostic steps, and is installed on the Agent node. The tool provides an easy way to gather all the connector logs with a simple command.

Alation Agent Docker Version Update

Upgraded the version of Docker bundled with the alation_container_service to 24.0.5.

Alation Analytics

Stewardship Data Is Available in Alation Analytics

Stewardship Workbench (Bulk Actions) data is now available in Alation Analytics. With this change, customers can query Alation Analytics to get metrics around bulk actions.

Third-Party BI Access to Alation Analytics

Cloud-native architecture only

Alation Cloud Service customers on the cloud-native architecture can now connect third-party BI tools to Alation Analytics. This is done by replicating your Alation Analytics database to Snowflake, where you can connect your BI tools to access Alation Analytics data.

Alation Anywhere

Slack Conversations

Added support for previewing Conversation object types in Slack, and added the conversation option for all supported object types. A user is able to quickly start new conversation from Slack per specific object, reply to conversation, or mark one as resolved.

Preview Dashboard Object Types in Slack and Microsoft Teams

Support of enhanced Dashboard preview in Alation Anywhere for Slack and Microsoft Teams integration.

Alation Database Schema Enhancements

Modified the Alation database schema to support larger volumes of metadata. Users can now ingest more metadata on a frequent basis without running into issues with integer overflow. Note that migrations during an upgrade can add an additional 30 minutes depending on the volume of the metadata.

Compose

Flexible Query Result Protection

To ensure Alation instances comply with customer security policies, this feature provides more control and flexibility to datasource admins on how query results can be shared. Datasource admins have three levels of control on whether the sharing the query result is allowed or not: No sharing is permitted, only private sharing is allowed, or allowing private and public sharing. Datasource admins can also control if users have the ability to preserve query results without automatic deletion

Compose Compatibility with Query Service-enabled OCF Connectors

Compose is now compatible with Query Service enabled Starburst Trino and SybaseIQ OCF Connectors, so that clients using these data sources can migrate to these OCF Connectors.

Compose Export Notifications

When Exporting a query execution, Compose will show an alert message containing the title of the query and the number of result rows exported upon each completed query statement, so that users are informed if the Export is successful.

Connected Sheets Improvements

  • Users can now see Column Titles were available in search left navigation bar

  • Search results auto expand in left navigation

Conversations

Conversations are now Reflected in Domains

Conversations about catalog objects, which are associated with data domains, are now transitively associated to the same domains.

Multiple Users and Groups Assigned to Conversations

  • Handling multiple assignees for a single conversation (before the change only one user could be assigned to a conversation).

  • Added possibility to assign group profiles to conversations.

Authentication

Metadata Extraction based on Cross-Account IAM Role-based Authentication

Support for cross-account authentication is needed for Metadata Extraction (MDE) between the Alation instance and AWS resources that might reside in different AWS accounts. With IAM role-based authentication, customers do not have to enter IAM user credentials in the Alation Catalog. Authentication is performed based on trust set up between an IAM role in the Alation account and an IAM role set up in the customer’s AWS account where the AWS resource is running. Metadata extraction and query log ingestion from the following OCF AWS connectors: S3, Glue, Athena, and Redshift, are supported by this feature.

API Authentication using JWT - Cloud-native architecture only

APIs can now be secured with JWT token-based authentication in addition to using opaque tokens. With this new authentication, customers can register an external application with Alation and use the JWT tokens assigned to the application for authentication and authorization.

Cloud Configuration - Cloud-native architecture only

New Cloud-Native Architecture Service: Entitlement and License Management Service

Cloud Entitlement and License service displays customer licenses in the license user interface page based on entitlement grants/revocations and track usage of features. The license screen can be viewed only by Server Admins.

Connectors

Azure Blob Storage OCF Connector, version 2.3.4

Improved the Azure Blob Storage OCF Connector performance by streaming directories on the fly instead of storing it in memory.

Azure Databricks OCF Connector

Azure Databricks OCF Connector Driver has been upgraded to 2.6.33. (AL-97592)

Databricks Unity Catalog OCF Connector, version 2.0.3

  • Added QLI support and upgraded the Simba Spark Driver 2.6.21 to the Databricks JDBC driver 2.6.33. (AL-118979)

  • Disabled QLI Lineage by default. The datasource admins no longer need to disable the automatic lineage generation flag on the datasource settings page manually to turn off QLI Lineage. (AL-130658)

Google BigQuery OCF Connector, version 1.1.8

Improved the memory management and performance of the Google BigQuery OCF Connector. (AL-125140)

Power BI OCF Connector

Power BI Dataflow features introduced for Power BI Scanner Connector. (AL-111227)

  • PowerBI Dataflow objects are now cataloged within Alation for the PowerBI OCF Scanner Connector.

  • Dataflow objects provide reusable transformation logic that can be shared by Datasets and Reports within PowerBI and the Power Platform.

  • Dataflow objects strengthen security around underlying datasources by exposing required data within it for reports instead of from the datasource.

  • Dataflows are cataloged alongside Datasets in Alation.

  • Users can now view the datasource referred by the Dataflow along with Datasets and Reports that are created from it and the fields that comprise the dataflow object.

  • Hybrid sources that power a Dataset, for example, created from Dataflow(s) and another datasource are now visible.

  • Dataflow objects can be nested i.e. created from other Dataflows.

Snowflake OCF Connector

  • Added check for supported Alation versions during installation. (AL-129242)

  • Installation will fail on unsupported Alation versions. (AL-129242)

SQL OCF Connector

  • Added check for supported Alation versions during installation. (AL-129243)

  • Installation will fail on unsupported Alation versions. (AL-129243)

Starburst Trino OCF Connector, version 1.2.8

  • Fixed the issue when a customer adds catalog name in JDBC URI, GET list of schemas picks up schemas for all catalogs. (AL-127362)

  • Changed Parser Grammar type from ANSI to PRESTO to align with native connector implementation. (AL-127352)

Tableau OCF Connector, version 1.6.1

  • Resolved out of memory issues and added support for report fields value sampling. (AL-127096) (AL-120383)

  • Fixed report columns value sampling feature. (AL-114383)

  • Added owner property for projects and sub projects. (AL-127028)

  • Added lineage support for tableau dashboards with hidden sheets. (AL-125127)

Enhanced User Experience for the OCF Connector Authentication Process (Private Preview)

OCF Connector Authentication improvements include: (AL-125067)

  • Enlarged the URI field to improve user readability and editing.

  • Clear help text for URI and QLI fields.

  • Streamlined the interface to display relevant fields based on the selected authentication method.

  • Rearranged the authentication process to follow a logical order: Connection, Service Account, Permissions, and QLI.

Governance – Machine Learning

Allie Steward Suggestions (Public Preview – Cloud-native architecture only)

Allie Suggested Stewards helps users automatically find the right people as stewards for each data object. This feature leverages a machine learning model that suggests stewards based on interactions, and also improves the suggestions over time by learning from user actions. This is applicable for cloud-native architecture customers only.

Lineage

Column-Level Lineage Tracing (Beta)

The compound layout has been enhanced to drill down from data sources to the column level with the ability to trace columns upstream and downstream across data source groups to capture a holistic end-to-end lineage view. (AL-126630)

Support for Rename and Deletion of RDBMS data sources in Lineage Source Groups

  • Deleting an RDBMS datasource deletes the corresponding lineage source group.

  • Renaming a RDBMS source renames the corresponding lineage source group.

Impoved Lineage Performance

Created scripts to clean up duplicate temp objects and dataflows from lineage to address performance issues with large graphs. (AL-107764)

Native to OCF Migration

Improvements made related to Bulk API for Native to OCF Migration. (AL-12868)

PostgreSQL Upgrade

PostgreSQL is upgraded to 13.11 from 13.6.

Search

Terms and Glossaries Improvements

  • Customers will now see all valid custom fields, fields present on one or more term type templates, as selectable options on Term Tables by default. (AL-127525).

  • Verbiage on Bulk Utility article body has been updated to indicate that other usages are “not supported” (previously “not recommended”). (AL-127569).

  • Term detail pages now show the “Description” field name. (AL-128745).

APIs

Public APIs for Table User Permission / Privacy Updates

Added Public APIs for updating the table permissions and privacy settings. More information is available in the swagger docs under ‘/openapi/members_permission/’ and ‘/openapi/privacy_settings/’. Server admins by default have access to both APIs. Members with catalog or source admin roles can only access these APIs if they are tagged as data source admins for the table’s parent data source.

Upload Data Dictionary Public API (Public Preview)

Public Preview of Upload Dictionary Public API that brings an improved, performant and asynchronous approach to update records supporting a csv as an input file.

Conversation Public API Version 2

The new API is available at the following endpoint: ‘/integration/v2/conversations/’. This API includes the ability to handle multiple assignees for a single conversation and added the possibility to assign group profiles to conversations.

Conversations Public API Improvements

  • Conversations Public API is updated with advanced handling of deleted conversations, including new search options and possibility to restore deleted conversation.

  • Updated the Conversations Public API V2 and Conversations Internal API to support new searching and filtering options. Users can search for conversations by creation date, assignee, or last response date. (AL-125306).

Workflows Public APIs

Public APIs for workflows are now available. These will allow users to list all the workflow requests, create a change request, and show workflow request details.

Bug Fixes

  • Alation Analytics: - Fixed issue causing customer to not be able to query rdbms_columns. (AL-126878)

    • Fixed issue causing deprecation flag description that was updated using the API not being updated in Alation Analytics V2. (AL-123876)

  • BI Migration:

    • Migration script validates if source and target are the same before starting migration using the script. (AL-127623)

    • Added validation for source and target when migrating servers from native to OCF in Alation. (AL-126483)

  • Bulk Import Utility: Fixed an issue causing keys inconsistency and incomplete, missing data source ID (ds_id) and causing an error. Download template now has all object sets of type table, data source, column, schema prepended with ds_id. (AL-119516)

  • Bulk Utility: Fixed issue to avoid Bulk Utility Download process issue on encountering a Term linked to a Glossary without title. (AL-125179)

  • Compose:

    • Comment syntax inside query variables are now treated as plain text. (AL-128065)

    • The “Open New Query In Compose” button from AAV2 dashboards now creates queries without titles and prevents them from being automatically published to avoid duplicate queries. (AL-126656)

    • Fixed issue causing Schedule Result Sharing Modal to not follow the admin setting ‘Allow Public Sharing Of Compose Results’. After the fix, public sharing is disabled if it is disabled from admin settings. (AL-124132)

  • Conversations: Fixed an issue causing the conversation resolution status to be empty or null. (AL-106466)

  • Google BigQuery OCF Connector: Fixed issue causing Lineage to not display for Temporary Tables and other connected upstream and downstream tables, although the queries are parsed successfully. Added support to show the lineage via a temporary node. (AL-117243)

  • Governance/Workflow: Fixed issues for Review Policy/Term object set and Suggest column object set. (AL-128809)

  • Lineage:

    • Added support to create lineage for duplicate queries with different comments across data sources. (AL-125865)

    • Fixed issue causing incorrect list of data sources to display for DataFlow sources. Deleting or renaming a RDBMS source now deletes/renames its corresponding lineage source groups. (AL-120403)

    • Fixed issue to support column-level lineage (CLL) for Select * queries with SET operators. (AL-77284)

  • Power BI Scanner OCF Connector: Fixed connector links for apps and app related objects. (AL-120876)

  • RDBMS Migration: Migration script validates if source and target are the same before starting migration using the script. (AL-127532)

  • Search:

    • Fixed an issue causing multi-picker custom fields in catalog search to not display an accurate not_set count for custom fields. (AL-116323) (AL-95802)

    • Fixed an issue when using Edit Columns on the Advanced Search page to not display custom fields. (AL-100937)

    • Fixed appearance of backend value for “not set” filter. (AL-130483)

  • Snowflake OCF Connector:

    • Fixes KeyError that occurs while Snowflake tag ingestion when a schema/table/column associated with a Snowflake tag is not found in Alation. (AL-128018)

    • Fixed failure in policy links ingestion due to missing objects caused by inconsistent custom queries for tables and columns. (AL-125463)

    • Fix failure in tag links ingestion due to missing objects caused by inconsistent custom queries for schemas, tables and columns. (AL-125462)

    • Fixed issue causing the error when trying to establish database connection in Compose when Snowflake datasource is configured to use OAuth. (AL-124305)

    • Fixed issue when detecting role switching for Snowflake configured using External Authentication. (AL-122112)

    • Lineage is not getting created for Snowflake Create View DDL queries having “With Tag” clause. (AL-115186)

  • Tableau OCF connector: Fixed connector links in Tableau OCF connector. (AL-118648)

KNOWN ISSUES

  • The upgrade to 2023.3.1 or a later minor version of 2023.3 may fail due to Postgres failing to start. The issue affects some of the Alation Cloud Service instances that have not been migrated to the cloud-native architecture and the on-premise instances that used a custom approach to the installation and installed the Postgres component in a Docker container. This issue can be addressed through a workaround: 2023.3.x Upgrade Fails Due to Postgres Not Starting. A fix will be provided in a future Alation version.