Data Popularity

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Alation displays the popularity of your data on data Catalog pages. For new users, the Popularity column is a quick way to assess which tables have the most relevant information in a data source and which tables are rarely used.

Popularity is relative to other objects in the same list. This means that if the Popularity bar of one object is twice as long as the Popularity bar of another object in the same list, the first item is used twice as often. However objects on different catalog pages with Popularity bars of the same length are probably not used equally as often.

Popularity is determined through an algorithm that accounts for both query ingestion (the number of data source accounts that used the object and the number of times the object was used) as well as from Compose usage (the number of Alation users that used the object and the number of times the object was used).