Add-On OCF Connector for dbt: Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The dbt OCF connector was developed by Alation and is available as a Zip file that can be uploaded and installed in the Alation application.

The dbt add-on is compatible with Alation release 2022.4.3 and later.

To download the dbt OCF connector package, go to the Alation Connector Hub available from the Customer Portal. Go to Customer Portal > Connectors > Alation Connector Hub. Only Alation users with access to the Customer Portal can access the Alation Connector Hub. If you don’t have access to the Customer Portal, contact Alation Support.

The dbt connector can be used as an add-on connector with a primary OCF connector to extract and catalog descriptions and lineage from dbt models, sources, and columns in dbt Core or dbt Cloud.

Note

Lineage is available from dbt add-on OCF connector version 2.0.0 or later and Alation version 2023.1 or later.

The dbt add-on cannot be used as a stand-alone connector as it works only with primary connectors that support it and shares the user interface of primary connectors. When the dbt add-on is configured for a primary connector, MDE will extract descriptions from dbt along with the metadata from the primary data source.

dbt Core:

  • The manifest.json file contains description and lineage for all dbt models that was included in the execution of the dbt job.

  • The following storage locations are supported to store the manifest.json files:

    • GitHub

    • Amazon S3

  • Alation supports multiple manifest files, but these need to be from dbt projects all related to the same dbt environment (Alation data source type). Only one most recent manifest file for each dbt project must be stored in a folder.

  • For Snowflake, the column names in dbt must be the same as in Snowflake tables.

dbt Cloud:

  • A dbt account has projects of different target environments like Snowflake, Postgres, and more. If the project names are not specified in Alation as part of extraction configuration, all projects for a data source type will be fetched.

  • If different projects have the same table signature (catalog_name.schema_Name.table_Name /catalog_name.schema_Name.table_Name.column_Name) then the latest fetch of the table/column description will be updated.

  • The connector will retrieve the manifest.json file from each project’s latest successful run to obtain the metadata from dbt Cloud.

See Supported Data Sources list for the data source types that support the add-on OCF Connector for dbt.

Team

You may need the assistance of your dbt administrator to configure the dbt add-on connector:

  • Alation Server Admin:

    • Installs the connector.

    • Configures the dbt add-on in the primary data source settings.

  • dbt Administrator:

    • dbt Core

      • Ensures the latest mainfest.json files are saved to the supported locations (GitHub or S3)

    • dbt Cloud

      • Provides dbt Account ID required for the API URL

      • Provide Access Token for use with dbt APIs

      • Provide the list of dbt Project Names for processing

Scope

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

Feature

Scope

Availability

Authentication

GitHub personal access token

Authenticate on the GitHub storage using a personal access token

Yes

Basic (AWS access key and secret key)

Authentication with AWS access key and secret key

Yes

AWS STS authentication

Authentication with an AWS STS access key and secret key

No

Metadata Extraction (MDE)

Default MDE

Extraction of metadata based on default extraction queries in the connector code

Yes

Custom query-based MDE

Extraction of metadata based on extraction queries provided by user

No

Popularity

Indicator of the popularity (intensity of use) of a data object, such as a table or a column

No

Extracted metadata objects

Table descriptions

Description of the dbt target table descriptions

Yes

Views descriptions

Descriptions of the views

Yes

Column descriptions

Description of the columns

Yes

Catalog Features

Sampling and profiling

Not applicable

QLI

Not applicable

Compose

Not applicable

Lineage

Jinja code extraction

Extraction of Jinja code from dbt into dataflow content

Yes

Automatic lineage generation

Auto-calculation of lineage based on query history ingested from QLI and MDE

Yes*

Column-level lineage

Calculation of lineage data at the column level. Column-level lineage is not applicable to the dbt connector, however, it can be viewed if CLL is supported by the primary data source.

Not applicable

Supported Data Sources

The table below lists data sources that support the dbt add-on connector.

Data Source

dbt type

dbt OCF Connector Version

Snowflake

dbt Core

1.0.0

dbt Cloud

2.0.0

PostgreSQL

dbt Core

1.0.0

dbt Cloud

2.0.0

Amazon Redshift

dbt Core

1.0.0

dbt Cloud

2.0.0

Google BigQuery

dbt Core, dbt Cloud

2.1.0

AWS Databricks

dbt Core, dbt Cloud

2.1.0

Azure Databricks

dbt Core, dbt Cloud

2.1.0

GCP Databricks

dbt Core, dbt Cloud

2.1.0

Databricks Unity Catalog

dbt Core, dbt Cloud

3.1.0 *

* Support for add-on connector for dbt for Databricks Unity Catalog OCF connector is available from Alation version 2024.3.1 and higher.

Lineage

This table has the types of materializations (built into dbt) supported by each data source.

Data Source

Table

View

Ephemeral

Incremental

Snowflake

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes*

PostgreSQL

No

Yes

No

No

Amazon Redshift

No

Yes

No

No

Google BigQuery

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes*

AWS Databricks

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes*

Azure Databricks

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes*

GCP Databricks

No

No

No

No

Databricks Unity Catalog

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes*

* The dbt lineage is available for incremental materialization if QLI returns a query for the first run of the incremental model. For subsequent incremental model runs, dbt inserts data from a temporary table to the actual table. Due to this solution in dbt, lineage is not generated between the source and the target.

Object Mapping

The following table shows the supported dbt objects and how they are cataloged in Alation:

dbt Objects

Alation

Table description

Table source comments

View description

View source comments

Column description

Column source comments