Comparison of Stewardship and Governance Dashboards

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The Governance Dashboard and Stewardship Dashboard both provide insights into the curation status of data within the Alation catalog. However, they use different data sources and update frequencies. These differences may lead to variations in the curation information displayed on these dashboards.

Governance Dashboard Updates

The Governance Dashboard sources its data from the Alation Analytics database and is unavailable if Alation Analytics is not in use. The dashboard is updated with each Alation Analytics ETL process.

All reports on the Governance Dashboard are populated through querying Alation Analytics. As you add custom fields to your RDBMS catalog pages, the queries evolve accordingly. Find more information about the specific queries on Alation Community: The Queries Behind the Governance Dashboard (requires a login).

Stewardship Dashboard Updates

The Curation Progress and Objects Without Stewards reports on the Stewardship Dashboard source data from the stewardship_objectcurationstatus table in the Alation internal database. These reports are incrementally updated in response to specific curation activities within the catalog, including:

• Updates to fields on a catalog object page by a user or via the public API.

• Updates to fields made through catalog sets.

• Updates to fields from a data dictionary or via bulk actions of the Stewardship Workbench.

The updates are reflected on the dashboard after a brief delay, necessary for processing the corresponding internal update tasks.

Additionally, a synchronization job runs every Saturday morning (default schedule) on the Alation server. This job updates the curation progress for all RDBMS objects in the catalog ensuring that the Stewardship Dashboard reflects the most current curation state. If any updates were not previously captured, they will be incorporated during this job.

Note

The Catalog Activity report on the Stewardship Dashboard is powered by a different table in the internal database, the logical_metadata_valuehistory. This report uses a distinct update logic, processing changes incrementally as users make catalog updates. The updates appear almost immediately on the dashboard. This report is not included in the weekly synchronization job.

Known Differences

Known differences between the Governance Dashboard and Stewardship Dashboard are summarized below. You may observe differences in curation progress data on these dashboards that are due to these factors:

Update Cadence

• Stewardship Dashboard

  • Updates occur immediately after curation changes are made, supplemented by a synchronization job over the weekend.

• Governance Dashboard

  • Updates are dependent on the Alation Analytics ETL process and occur with each ETL cycle.

Handling of Deleted and Excluded Objects

Sometimes objects are deleted from the catalog. Deleted objects are marked as deleted in the internal database. Some existing objects may be excluded from Alation Search through catalog sets or the Per-Object Parameter settings of the parent data source. Since excluded objects are not discoverable by users they may be considered irrelevant to the curation calculations also. The Stewardship and Governance Dashboards treat deleted and excluded objects differently.

• Stewardship Dashboard

  • The logic behind the Stewardship dashboard evaluates objects that are neither deleted nor excluded. Only visible and active catalog objects are considered in the calculations. Deleted and excluded objects are not.

• Governance Dashboard

  • Child objects of deleted or excluded parents are still included in calculations because the deletion or exclusion status is not propagated to child objects in the internal database. As a result, child objects are not marked as deleted or excluded in Alation Analytics.

Consideration of Catalog Sets

• Stewardship Dashboard

  • Accounts for changes made via catalog sets.

• Governance Dashboard

  • Does not account for changes made via catalog sets.

Child Object Weighting in Calculations

• Stewardship Dashboard

  • Uses a weighted calculation method for child objects when assessing curation progress on parent objects. For example, for object types that can be parent objects (data source, schema, table) the formula is:

    object_curation = 0.5 * (number_fields_curated_with_value/total_number_of_fields_applicable) + 0.5 * (children_curation)

• Governance Dashboard

  • Does not apply a weighted approach to child objects, which may result in different curation progress results as compared to the Stewardship Dashboard.