Alation

The Alation software has at its core a data catalog but was designed from the outset to utilise both machine learning and crowdsourcing to help improve data literacy. It had a natural language interface from the start, and in 2023 its user interface had a significant overhaul. The product can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise, and has a substantial set of connectors (over a hundred) to other technologies including Snowflake, Databricks and relational databases such as Oracle, as well as numerous other sources. It can read metadata from these sources (database catalogs, etc.) and from other metadata products.

Fig 1 – Alation data intelligence platform

The technology has interfaces to third party data quality tools and also to analytics products such as Tableau. The software allows customers to discover, understand and govern their data, as well as ensure its quality. It provides support to data stewards through policy definition, workflow and community discussion forums where data stewards can share best practices and help each other. There is a business glossary where individual data sources can be explained down to the individual column level. For example, in the case of accounting data sources, the glossary may contain definitions of terms like gross and net profit, earnings before interest and tax, cashflow etc. Alation’s catalog has search capability and various visualisation tools to help business users understand their data landscape better.

Customer Quotes

“As an industry leader ourselves, we choose to partner with companies like Alation that have the same innovative fabric, and who also enjoy the same industry recognition that we do.”
Pavan Tumu, Director of Product Management, Salesforce

“By improving the speed at which we are able to acquire and use data, we can turn that saved time into product innovations that help us remain No.1 in customer satisfaction and delivering personalized customer experiences.”
Prakash Jaganathan, Sr. Director, Enterprise Data Platforms, Discover Financial Services

As well as the core data catalog, Alation has data lineage functionality based on its own intellectual property, including ways to visualise the flow of data and carry out impact analysis. This capability is less mature than the core catalog itself, reflected in several customer comments, but Alation has a roadmap for this planned for 2023 into 2024, is rightly seen as strategic by the vendor, and is the subject of significant investment. Alation can ingest data from many data sources, and allows business users to assess and score the reliability of data. It has APIs that are open to data quality tools, and has partnerships with several, including Experian and Monte Carlo.

Alation has an artificial intelligence software layer (“Allie AI”) based on a foundation model using Meta’s LLaMA large language model. It deploys pre-processing and post-processing to ensure the quality of the descriptions produced and assesses the reliability and quality of these in a traffic light form based on its post-processing. One strong feature of Alation is its ability to read the logs of databases to determine the levels of usage of data sources by business users; for example, which systems are most heavily used and which may be under-utilised. The company’s website offers an unusually wide range of customer case studies and testimonials.

Alation is a modern data governance tool built around a strong data catalog. Customer reviews consistently highlight the friendly user interface, which itself has just been further improved in its latest release. This makes it suitable for data governance initiatives that require high levels of engagement with business users rather than more technical staff i.e. just about all such initiatives. The software has plenty of productivity options, such as automatically ingesting metadata from many sources, and its newest capability of allowing bulk generation of business descriptions via generative AI techniques. It has all the capabilities that you would expect of a data governance tool, and interfaces to leading data quality and business analytic tools.

The Bottom Line

Alation is one of the market leaders in the data governance market, with a strong customer base and a highly functional set of technology with some innovative features. It should be considered carefully by any organization that wishes to implement a data governance program.