Metadata Upload

The Metadata Upload feature can be used to upload Alation metadata like trust check flags, descriptions, and tags directly in the BI source for objects like data sources, tables, and columns. This feature is also known as Alation Anywhere for Tableau. You can find basic information about configuring the metadata upload on this page. For more comprehensive documentation, see Alation Anywhere for Tableau.

Note

This feature is not yet supported when connections between Alation Cloud Service and an on-premise BI server are established using an Alation Agent.

Perform the following steps to upload the Alation metadata to the BI server:

  1. On the Settings page of your Tableau OCF connector, go to the Metadata Upload tab.

  2. Click the Upload Configuration tab and enable the Enable Automatic Upload toggle. This toggle is disabled by default.

Schedule Upload

You can also schedule the upload. To schedule the upload, perform these steps:

  1. Once the Enable Automatic Upload toggle is enabled, the schedule upload fields will appear.

  2. Using the date and time widgets, select the recurrence period and day and time for the desired metadata upload. The next metadata upload job for your BI source will run on the schedule you have specified.

Note

Here are some of the recommended schedules for better performance:

  • Schedule upload to run for every 12 hours at the 30th minute of the hour.

  • Schedule upload to run for every 2 days at 11:30 PM.

  • Schedule upload to run every week on the Sunday and Wednesday of the week.

  • Schedule upload to run for every 3 months on the 15th day of the month.

Upload Job History

You can view the status of the upload actions after you run the upload or after Alation triggers the MDE upload as per the schedule.

To view the status of upload, go to Metadata Upload > Upload Job History on the Settings page of your Tableau BI source. The upload job status table is displayed.

The Upload job status table logs the following status:

  • Succeeded - Indicates that the upload was successful.

  • Failed - Indicates that the upload failed with errors.

Click the View Details link to view a detailed report of metadata upload. If there are errors, the Job errors table displays the error category, error message, and a hint (ways to resolve the issue). Follow the instructions under the Hints column to resolve the error.

In some cases, Generate Error Report link is displayed above the Job errors table. Click the Generate Error Report link above the Job errors table to generate an archive (.zip) containing CSV files for different error categories, such as Data and Connection errors. Click Download Error Report to download the files.