Alation Data Catalog doesn't support end-to-end lineage. By that, I mean the ability to trace the movement of data from when it first comes into our organization to where it's consumed. Along the way, the data is stored in different places, transformed, aggregated, etc. The journey can be quite a long one from the perspective of a single piece of data, so we needed to track the lineage, and it didn't work as expected. It worked in parts, but it wasn't end-to-end. And we've had to rely on some workarounds to overcome some issues and still not where we want it to be. We understand that there's a lot of functionality coming up that we'll just have to wait for. When we purchased the tool, we knew that Alation was innovating and would be releasing new features and functionality every quarter. We were more excited than we would be about a stable product that puts out one update per year. And we knew we would find areas where Data Catalog either couldn't support a use case or we had to do a workaround. That has been the case, but Alation has been fairly quick to show us where these fixes or features will come out on their product roadmap. We've only had to rely on them a couple of times to provide workarounds for alternative solutions or options. However, that might be more tactical in nature rather than getting to what we want to do. There have been points where we haven't been able to do exactly what we want to do, but we've always been able to work around these issues or wait until the features have been made available. That lineage would be an excellent example where it didn't support our requirements out of the box from day one. But it's been a journey where we've understood what they've released, how it worked, what doesn't work, what's coming up, and when we'll be able to kick that off again.
