Senior Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
MSP
Top 20
2023-10-25T05:29:00Z
Oct 25, 2023
It was not very clear how to connect to databases. The interface is not user-friendly. Some things in the interface must be made user-friendly. Some features are quite technical. A non-technical user might find the tool difficult to use.
Alation Data Catalog cannot scan the custom pages of Power BI. Having the capability to scan the custom pages of Power BI would be a great feature in Alation Data Catalog. Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage. It cannot provide a data lineage where the data is going from one data source to another. Alation Data Catalog currently lacks these features.
Project Manager - Data Governance, Master Data Systems at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
2022-07-21T08:21:14Z
Jul 21, 2022
Alation Data Catalog needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution. It also has fewer features than competitors like Informatica and has issues with integration. In the next release, Data Catalog should include a visualization feature for data quality and profiling.
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.
Senior Data Governance Specialist at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-10-14T18:59:00Z
Oct 14, 2021
I know that this has been on their roadmap and they're working on it, but as a whole, there's an untapped reservoir of capabilities within their article features that could be used and built upon.
Alation pioneered the data catalog market and is now leading its evolution into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions including data search & discovery, data governance, lineage, stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation.
Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata...
The product's data governance features need improvement.
It was not very clear how to connect to databases. The interface is not user-friendly. Some things in the interface must be made user-friendly. Some features are quite technical. A non-technical user might find the tool difficult to use.
The tool's domain model needs to be changed.
Alation Data Catalog cannot scan the custom pages of Power BI. Having the capability to scan the custom pages of Power BI would be a great feature in Alation Data Catalog. Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage. It cannot provide a data lineage where the data is going from one data source to another. Alation Data Catalog currently lacks these features.
Alation Data Catalog needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution. It also has fewer features than competitors like Informatica and has issues with integration. In the next release, Data Catalog should include a visualization feature for data quality and profiling.
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.
I know that this has been on their roadmap and they're working on it, but as a whole, there's an untapped reservoir of capabilities within their article features that could be used and built upon.