Versions Before 1.5.0

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Important

This section is applicable to all Alation versions and SQL Server OCF Connector versions prior to 1.5.0.

You can configure metadata extraction (MDE) for an OCF data source on the Metadata Extraction tab of the Settings page. Refer to Configure Metadata Extraction for OCF Data Sources for information about the available configuration options.

The default queries that the connector uses to extract metadata can be found in Extraction Queries for SQL Server. You can customize these queries to adjust extraction to your specific needs.

Metadata Extraction from Compose

If a table is created from Compose, users will be able to see the relevant table metadata on the catalog page without re-running MDE.

Users should use the following query format to create tables in Compose:

CREATE TABLE [CATALOG_NAME].[SCHEMA_NAME].[TABLE_NAME] ({column properties});

For creating view, catalog name needs to be included in the Compose JDBC URI on the General Settings page as database=<Catalog_Name>.

Use following query to create VIEW:

USE [CATALOG_NAME]
CREATE VIEW [SCHEMA_NAME].[TABLE_NAME] AS {view condition}

Note

  • When you create a view from Compose, the MDE job will get triggered automatically and fail with the error EmptyStreamException. Alternately, MDE can be run manually after creating the view to extract the view on the relevant catalog page.

  • For lineage to be generated successfully for View, fully qualified name of the table needs to be mentioned in the view condition.

  • For Drop table scenario, table will be removed from catalog page and automated MDE job will not be triggered. It is an expected behaviour.