December is usually a hectic time of last-minute shopping, parties, celebrations, and wrapping gifts. As we closed out December, we spent a lot of time giving the gift of more great features and enhancements to the Atlan platform.
Here are our 11 favorite features from December 2022, featuring new integrations, insights, cost optimizations, automations, metrics, and more.
Supporting and integrating your (meta)data family
The year’s end is a great time to reflect on the past year and look forward to the year ahead. At Atlan, we want to create the active metadata layer across the entire data stack. From modern cloud warehouses to traditional documentation tools, we released new connections and integrations in December to support all your needs.
1. New Hive Connector package
People often ask about our support for file systems like Parquet, Avro, Iceberg, and more. We know all of your data is important, so we’re excited to introduce our Hive integration to handle these distributed file systems.
Now you can connect to Hive, catalog all of your tables, and view sample data extracted from the table. Once the data is brought in, users can leverage the asset 360° profiles for their Hive assets to assign ownership, apply certificates, tag classifications, associate the proper business terms, and even run queries to further explore the data.
2. Google Sheets: support for new data assets and downloadable lineage impact analysis
Spreadsheets have always been the OG of data documentation. Earlier in the year, we introduced our integration with Google Sheets to speed up the metadata documentation process for data teams. Now, we have expanded that integration to make documentation even easier and more robust across your entire data estate.
Now you can import column-level metadata from Tableau data sources, Power BI tables, Looker Explores, and Salesforce objects directly into Google Sheets. This makes it easier to document metadata from multiple data assets, reducing manual documentation and freeing up valuable time for data teams.
In addition, you can now fetch and download a data asset’s downstream impact in Google Sheets. Understanding how a simple change to one asset can impact assets downstream is critical to the stability and trust of the business. One change to a dataset upstream can create chaos in downstream data pipelines and dashboards, resulting in a disruption to the business. This downstream impact analysis will help users prevent breaks and maintain trust as they change upstream assets.
Shopping the most popular data assets and saving on costs
Every holiday season, people are looking for ways to find and save on those “must-have” items. Wouldn’t it be great if we could help data teams and data consumers with the same concept? This set of releases helps data teams not only save costs but also understand the “most-used” assets in their data estate.
3. Cost-optimized data preview for BigQuery
Everyone is looking to save money during the holidays, and it is no different when it comes to your cloud data warehouse bills.
With this release, users can now save money with a new data preview feature for all BigQuery table-type assets. Available in the Assets and Insights tab, users receive a cost nudge with the precise bytes that will be spent while executing a query. This appears for all assets, such as views, materialized views, and so on. From there, users can decide if they still want to continue running the query based on the amount of bytes spent.
4. Popularity and usage metrics for Snowflake
Controlling data costs often comes down to knowing which data assets you can trust, which have fresh data, which are used often, and which can be eliminated. That’s why we’ve added new usage and popularity metrics to help data teams manage their Snowflake assets.
Use these capabilities to save cloud data warehouse spending costs by identifying the most used assets, learning which queries are slow or expensive, finding people with the most context on each data asset, and more.
Empowering everyone with queries and insights
Whether you celebrate the end of the year with Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or another tradition entirely, the holidays are about embracing diversity — and Atlan is just the same. Data teams like to query information in a variety of ways. One of the ways we support this diversity is through Atlan’s Insights tab, where you can use custom SQL-based queries to explore and analyze all of your data assets. Now we have made this experience even easier, more intuitive, and more powerful.
5. Search and sort capabilities come to query results
Who doesn’t love to query data? But what happens when the results are in the wrong order, or you forget to write a sort command in your SQL? Or what if you simply can’t find an item in the results that you’re looking for?
At Atlan, we never miss a chance to enhance our user experience. Now, with just the click of a button, you can sort the data columns in either ascending or descending order. You can also use the search bar to find an item you want and get the results you need. These two capabilities limit the need for SQL and reduce the number of queries you need to get the right results.
6. Greater control over query collections
Capturing and disseminating important knowledge is critical for empowering diverse data people and helping them succeed.
With this release, more people can add their knowledge to query collections. While only the collection owner can delete a collection, other members can now invite, update, and manage the collection. All of this ensures that important knowledge is captured and maintained even if the query owner leaves or is unavailable.
7. Updates to the Insights Dashboard
Understanding how people are querying your organization’s data can be a challenge. Now, in the Atlan Reporting Center, you can get the insights you need with the Insights tab.
- Investigate how many visual queries have been saved, and who the top users are
- Monitor all of the saved queries, for both SQL and visual queries
- Find all scheduled queries set up in Atlan, sorted by frequency, including the top users scheduling queries
- Explore other aspects like connectors, certified assets, classifications, and more.
Activating the modern data stack with end-to-end lineage
Data lineage plays a key role in solving problems like root cause analysis or impact analysis. And the more diverse your data assets, the more important lineage becomes for understanding how they are all related. That’s why Atlan is all about activating end-to-end data lineage for your entire data estate, from data sources to the BI layer.
8. New Atlan + dbt partnership is now GA!
Some of you may have heard about Atlan and dbt’s partnership and Semantic Layer integration. Today, we are excited to launch Atlan + dbt for everyone!
Atlan pulls in metrics and models from dbt and maps column-level lineage across the modern data stack, creating 360° context for your data and helping data teams work together better. Atlan’s deep integration with dbt and its Semantic Layer also lets you create repeatable, metadata properties — like table owners and verified tags — in your dbt models.
9. List-based search in lineage graphs
When trying to view a large lineage graph, the ability to search for assets in that graph comes in handy. To make that experience much more seamless, we have introduced list-based search to help you quickly explore lineage.
All of the assets in a graph will now show up as a list as soon as you try to search the lineage graph. Simply click or type the asset name you are looking for, and the asset and its associated lineage will be highlighted.
Delivering the magic of automation
The end of the year is usually hectic — so much to do, so little time. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a magic wand to help complete all of the tasks that you have on your list?
While we aren’t magicians here at Atlan, we do love to automate wherever possible. In the past, we’ve introduce features like our Google integration or Trident suggestions to automate manual tasks. But this month included our biggest automation win so far.
10. Introducing Atlan Playbooks
One of the common questions we get from data teams is, “How can we automate our metadata?” While other teams like marketing or sales can do action-based automation at scale with tools like Zapier or Salesforce, data teams don’t have the bandwidth to code custom automations for each diverse use case. Why can’t there be a Zapier for metadata?
That is why we have developed the first low-code/no-code metadata automation for data teams. With Atlan’s Playbooks, users can now create rule-based automations at scale. These can drive endless use cases across your organization, everything from deprecating unused assets and protecting sensitive data to changing ownership and reporting failed assets.
Adding a sprinkle of holiday cheer for Admins
We can never forget those who are in charge of governing and managing an organization’s data estate. Yes, the admins. The people who play one of the most important roles in an organization — disseminating the data assets that data teams need to support diverse business use cases.
11. New overview page for Workflows
Workflows is a busy place, with connections to create, jobs to run, and the latest runs to monitor. All of this can be difficult for admins to manage without a single view into all these activities. To make life easier, we have added an overview page for each connection, allowing admins to instantly get information about the latest runs for a particular workflow and more.
We’re always working to help data teams get the most from metadata across their data estate, and this month’s new features are just a few of the 200 updates we delivered throughout the year. Check out our favorite features from 2022 or our November product roundup for even more metadata magic.
💡 To learn more about the latest features in Atlan, check out shipped.atlan.com. You can also subscribe to our Product Updates newsletter for all updates.
💡 To learn more about all of our releases, check out shipped.atlan.com. You can also subscribe to our Product Updates newsletter for all the latest news.
💡 To check out Atlan for yourself, visit our product tour.
💡 Ready to start using these new features? Reach out to our Sales team or your Customer Success Manager to find out how.
