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Alation Reviews & Product Details - Page 6

Alation Product Details

Alation is the data intelligence company. Nearly 600 global enterprises — including 40% of the Fortune 100 — rely on Alation to realize value from their data and AI initiatives. Customers such as Cisco, DocuSign, Nasdaq, and Pfizer trust Alation’s platform for self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI-ready data, fostering data-driven innovation at scale.

Product Website

Seller

Alation

Discussions

Alation Community

Languages Supported

English

Product Description

Alation is a data catalog designed to empower analysts to search, query & collaborate on data to gain faster, more accurate insights.

Overview by

Anh Dang

Value at a Glance

Averages based on real user reviews.

Time to Implement

6 months

View More Pricing Information

Alation Media

Search: Quickly find data with natural language or advanced search capabilities like tags, asset types, and more

Compose guides SQL writers to the right data and away from the wrong data. Queries are color-coded in real time with data quality insights and recommended tables and columns based on popularity. Improve trustworthiness of query results and ensure compliant data use.

Communicate seamlessly with others and assign tasks right in the workflow

View lineage, tags, quality, trust flags, endorsements, and comments from other users. Now you know how reliable each asset is at a glance.

ALLIE AI builds upon Alation’s machine learning (ML) core to enable organizations to save time and scale data initiatives more efficiently, democratize trusted data, and advance new AI initiatives.

Measuring the impact of your governance efforts against goals is crucial. The governance dashboard provides leaders visibility into curation progress metrics to monitor if goals are being met.

Official Downloads

(3)

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The Catalog is the Platform for Data Intelligence

Alation's Active Data Governance Methodology

How Alation Automates Data Governance Workflows

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AI

Verified User in Information Technology and Services

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

8/6/2020

"An innovative Data Catalog Tool"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Alation?

The road map of the potential of the Data Catalog. Always improving the product and getting into areas to make it the one stop shop. Alation is easy to use, like a google search, a smart algorithm to show the right search results to the top using natural language processing. There's data popularity, sampling and lineage that makes the tool more useful. The collaborative feature of being able to start conversation any where in Alation is great. Getting notified by email and having a dedicated inbox in Alation helps as well. Analytics is a useful data base to help show statistics and trends of what users are doing. Overall, the tool is pretty easy to use and can be quite educational. Having all the data in one place in your company and being able to search is very powerful for a company. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

There limited testing done on each build, always an issue in each release. Needs more stability. There are performance issues from time to time, we've had to figure out ways to optimize the database and needed to change our disk and ram size a few times in order to accommodate our data sets and performance. No PowerBI connector for visualization reports. No easy way to request access to the data or shop for data. Needs more lineage capabilities for automated lineage. There are still some short comings but I believe they are working on addressing it all in the upcoming releases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Alation:

Alation is very complete tool and can be used and deployed for most clients. If there aren't to many requirements, what Alation can do well is be the data catalog tool. If you require more from your users, it's probably doable in one fashion or another. If you need automated lineage, or better insights to your users, or being able to stay current with GDPR and other Privacy guidelines. All can be done with Alation with a bit of work. Out of the box you get everything you need to setup a catalog. Just need to ensure the connections are compatible with Alation. If your data is mostly in a SAS environment then do more diligent research. If you want to report use of Dashboards in the company, Tableau works great but PowerBI is not supported out of the box. Advice review your requirements and understand what's needed so you can make the right choice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?

One place for the Data Dictionary for our company. Who the experts are and having a data taxonomy. In addition, being able to show lineage for transformations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AS

Abhay S.

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

8/6/2020

"Data catloging and analytics tool"

4/5

What do you like best about Alation?

I am the platform admin and Alation SME for more that 2 years. I liked Alation Analytics feature most which are providing so many in-depth knowledge of the system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

Alation is some how lagging from Data Governance front. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UC

Verified User in Computer Software

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

8/6/2020

"Alation works well for a small shop but still not mature enough for enterprise big time"

4/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Easy to browse around for schema, tables & metadata about them, see sample queries. Search is fast & straight forward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

Difficult to find the relationships, cardinality, and other metadata about data models & linages between data sources. Often extremely slow to run any query of reasonable complexity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Alation:

If you are small or midsize shop, go ahead give it a try. For large enterprise, there may be better alternatives offering more features & better performance if you can afford them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?

Provide a central web portal & repository to store & find metadata about data in the enterprise. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UI

Verified User in Insurance

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

8/6/2020

"Alation review"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Popularity and usability of the tool for the enterprise Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

support and technical change needs of their product Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AA

Verified User in Automotive

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

8/6/2020

"Data Catalog that facilitates collaboration between business users and developers"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Our team really likes the collaborative features, as well as the tool being tailored to business user's needs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

Support and issue resolution times, low transparency on upcoming features Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UI

Verified User in Information Technology and Services

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

9/8/2020

"Best query catalog"

4/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Best catalog and query scheduler available Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

Option to make specific query private or public Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

US

Verified User in Staffing and Recruiting

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

6/23/2020

"Easy to use"

5/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Simple to use interface, great customer service Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

I overall enjoy Alation's software solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

MM

Megan M.

Reporting & Measurement Analyst

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

2/14/2019

"Does not replace a local database manager tool"

2/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Collaboration features, when used widely Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

Slow, buggy, hard to use collaboratively Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Alation:

Unless collaboration is greatly required for your business needs and no other software can solve them, Alation is not a better alternative to local database tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Alation as our main query editor and executor. I perform most of my query writing and testing in Alation.

The collaboration features, such as sharing and publishing queries, defining metadata, displaying most used columns, have great potential to provide leverage, if widely used by people in the organization. However they are difficult to use.

For example, when sharing a query, an email is sent to the recipient with an useless subject line ([Colleague] has shared a query with you) with a body section that provides no further information. It would be useful if Alation could at least share the title of the query or a preview of the query. Instead I need to open the query in order to understand what exactly was shared.

Then, once I have clicked on the link, it does not bring me to the editor and executor UI. I need to then click on Compose. However, I still cannot run the query because it is in read-only mode and instead have to save it as another query. There are so many steps in order to simply run the query and see some output, that I usually copy and paste my queries into a messaging app. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Chitra Rakesh of Alation

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Dear Megan,

Thanks for sharing your concerns. Please note that they have been resolved in Alation R6 as our customer success lead, Monoo Prasad, would have communicated. With the new query collaboration features, you can see the title, connect to Compose, and directly run the query.

We sincerely hope that you're able to collaborate better with these enhancements.

Cheers,

Team Alation

UF

Verified User in Financial Services

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

9/23/2019

"Great data catalog for organizations with lots of data producers and consumers"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Ability to search for columns and tables. Also like the ability to write SQL queries and see the commonly used join criteria. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

Limited data lineage capabilities to show how data moves from one data source to another. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Alation:

Great tool for organizations with many data analysts who are hands on working with the data and writing SQL Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sharing metadata about our data assets, writing and sharing queries. Benefits are knowledge management and stronger data governance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

IC

Iun C.

Business Intelligence Associate, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

1/13/2019

"Gets the job done but with quirks "

2.5/5

What do you like best about Alation?

Areas of Alation that I like are the simple UI and straightforward organization of the tool. Searching is fairly easy for different tables or schemas and my favorite part is being about to work across different databases (Teradata and Hive). For the most part, no major issues with Alation. It works well for our business. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Alation?

The description and color-coding feature to describe tables isn’t too helpful and actually makes information confusing. Biggest pet peeve with a Alation is also the runtime errors with querying sometimes. Often enough if I have the page sitting for a few extra minutes, I have to refresh the page in order to run the query again. Not a big deal but could make the experience better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Chitra Rakesh of Alation

edit

Iun, thanks for leaving us a review.

Our customer success lead, Monoo Prasad, connected with you in March 2019 to address the matter and again recently to provide an update. We sincerely hope that both of your concerns have been resolved.

Happy cataloging and querying!

Team Alation