Each month, the Atlan engineering team goes through the process of prepping new features, testing them out, and making sure they are JUST RIGHT before feeding them to hungry customers and prospects.
Last month was no different. With new ways for you to access metadata context, enrich your metadata landscape, and glean insights from your data, there was a lot to be thankful for this November.
Diversity is a feature
Diversity is the only reality when it comes to data teams, from business users, to data analysts, to data engineers and more. Each has a diverse set of tools they use, from BI dashboards and CRM systems to data pipelines and cloud data warehouses. Wouldn’t it be easier for users to get the context they need right in the tools they spend most of their time in? At Atlan, we think so!
Atlan Chrome Extension
Get with the flow? No, more like stay in the flow! That is exactly what the new Atlan Chrome extension allows users to do — get the context you need, where you need it.
Imagine you’re looking at a dashboard and want to know who owns it and what a metric means. How would you go about it?
Well, you would probably have to figure out who the owner was. Then you would most likely take a screen grab of the dashboard, email or Slack it to that owner, and ask your questions. Not anymore!
Now you can skip all those steps by simply clicking on the Atlan icon in your browser. It will open the Atlan Chrome extension right in your dashboard, giving you all the context you need right when you need it.
Leverage the Atlan Chrome extension in Looker, Tableau Online, Snowsight, Mode, Power BI, BigQuery, and Salesforce, with more tools on the way.
November is a time to connect with your (meta)data family
It’s the time of the year to connect with family and friends. That’s why Atlan continues to make connecting to more data tools, old and new, a top priority.
A new SAP HANA connector package
For many companies, ERP systems are the lifeblood of their organization — for accounting, procurement, compliance, and more. Generating reports on these company metrics can help with better decision-making.
And guess what? Nobody wants to miss the party! That’s why we’re excited to announce a native connection to SAP HANA, the most popular ERP system.
Quickly configure the connection to your SAP HANA instance from the Atlan Marketplace and bring your SAP HANA assets into Atlan, enabling governance, lineage, and — with direct connectivity — querying.
Support for Microsoft SQL Server
Atlan doesn’t hold any grudges when it comes to data. While we’re all about leveraging the power of the cloud, we realize that discovering data assets in on-premise systems has been a big challenge. Our customers and prospects have spoken, and we hear you. Given that a lot of legacy data assets tend to reside in these on-premise systems, it’s critical to catalog and build governance around these assets.
Now you can ingest Microsoft SQL Server on-premise databases and see them in Atlan. This will help in solving major use cases like on-premise system discovery and migration to cloud data warehouses.
Bulk update metadata with Google Sheets
We know that documenting metadata is hard. While we can’t completely eliminate the process of manually documenting metadata, our Google Sheets integration will speed up the metadata documentation process for data teams.
The new integration with Google Sheets allows you to document descriptions, certifications, and announcements for columns in Google Sheets and sync it all back to Atlan with a single click.
Queries, queries, and more queries
Information and action are what data queries are all about. Atlan wants to make it easy for users to explore and analyze all of the tables they want to query, regardless of their skillset, through written queries or the Visual Query Builder. We bring the power of metadata into the querying experience to create a unique way to build and understand queries.
Introducing the first-ever metadata-enriched query editor
Atlan’s core objective is to create context and enable powerful data discovery by activating metadata. Why? Because we can! But seriously, we want to change the way data teams are able to work with and understand data across their entire data estate. With this release, we’re enriching our Insights query editor with metadata!
When hovering over columns and tables used in a query, users will see a popup with metadata like descriptions, classifications, and owners. This popup enables all users, even those who are unfamiliar with the SQL query, to understand and get context on every data asset used.
A better way to share context for saved queries
Saved queries are an integral part of democratizing access to data, but they need context-rich documentation to help your team understand and use them.
With this release, we’ve made it easier to add context to saved queries through accessible descriptions and announcements. This will better empower your teammates who want to use saved queries for analytics.
Query columns from the asset sidebar
Remember when you could only query a table from the asset profile or from the table sidebar? Wasn’t that so annoying? Especially when you only wanted to query a column!
Well, this update makes it possible to also query a specific column from the asset profile and the sidebar, through written SQL queries or the Visual Query Builder.
What does this mean for you? Now you can get to querying faster, right from the sidebar, and view a specific column of data without querying the entire table, saving costs on running queries.
Email notification for failed scheduled queries
Don’t you hate being the last to know and the first one people complain to?
Now you’ll get an email notification whenever a scheduled query fails, with the name of the query, so you can troubleshoot and get it running in no time.
Finer controls for scheduled queries
We know that some of you are very particular when it comes to scheduling queries, so we wanted to make it as granular as possible.
With this release, you can now:
- Go down to the minute for hourly and daily runs
- Select multiple days for a weekly run
- Select multiple dates for a monthly run
- Write your own custom cron
That is what we call finer controls around scheduling queries.
Download an impact analysis report
Making changes to data is the easy part, but what else will be affected when you change a column name or remove a field from a table?
With this release, you will now be able to download your asset’s downstream and upstream impact as a list. When changes are made to your assets, you can now get context on the changes’ downstream impact.
This report will also help with debugging issues in an asset by making it easier to perform root-cause analysis on upstream assets.
Get your data ingredients right with reporting and governance
Wouldn’t it be great if I could have a centralized place where I can get a visual perspective of my entire data estate? Somewhere to see what data assets are being utilized throughout the organizations in a single browser based experience? What if I could see what assets are missing critical metadata information, like descriptions or associated business terms?
Luckily this is all available — you just have to click the Reporting tab! And this month, we have continued to improve that experience across a multitude of functions.
Introducing an all-new Governance Dashboard in the Reporting Center
We are happy to introduce an all-new Governance Dashboard in the Reporting Center. Think of this as your one-stop shop for managing all aspects of governance in Atlan, including Personas, Purposes, Classifications, and Requests.
You’ll now be able to answer questions like: “How many personas in Atlan have query access?”, “How many policies are present in Atlan?” , “How many assets have been classified via propagation?” and many more! Governance doesn’t have to be difficult, and the new Governance Dashboard is here to help.
New updates to the Insights Dashboard in the Reporting Center
Insights about insights? No way! Much like the Governance Dashboard, the Atlan Reporting Center now has an Insights Dashboard to help track queries run in Atlan.
Find the most popular queries, the users who save the most queries, and track their enrichment progress. This helps you understand which queries are missing important metadata like certification, classification, descriptions, terms and more.
Track usage patterns of insights in your organization and understand who uses it the most, as well as how often your sources are queried over time!
Enforce user credentials to view a sample data preview
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have you in our system. We can’t let you in.“
Isn’t this ideal? Now connection admins can force users to validate their credentials before viewing sample data previews, helping you enforce better governance across your organization.
At Atlan, we want to ensure that you get the most value out of your metadata. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our customers’ experience with the Atlan platform. These features are just a subset of all of the great improvements that we have made recently.
To learn more about all of the latest features in Atlan, visit shipped.atlan.com. If you don’t have access to the latest and greatest version of Atlan, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
