Alation + Snowflake: Driving Data Culture

By Nolan Necoechea

Published on September 22, 2020

Alation Snowflake partnership

In case you somehow missed it, last week Alation’s partner Snowflake, leading provider of cloud-based data warehousing solutions, had the biggest tech IPO of 2020. While everyone has Snowflake on the brain, we figured it might be a good time to remind you that Alation and Snowflake go together like hot cocoa and a snowy day. Enterprises investing in Snowflake for the flexibility and cost savings of a modern cloud data warehouse see a huge boost in analyst productivity and data culture with Alation.

Pairing Alation with Snowflake provides three main benefits:

  • Empower Anyone to Find Trusted Data: Alation makes it easy for anyone — from data scientists to business users — to find and understand trusted data. And, as data consumers find relevant data in Snowflake, Alation surfaces intelligent suggestions to surface related data assets, projections, policies, and guidelines to ensure that the data is being used the right way.

  • Go Farther, Together: With the rise of self-service analytics, more and more people have been enabled to create reports, dashboards, and visualizations. While these assets are available in Snowflake, data consumers often don’t know they exist and end up needlessly recreating work. With Alation, data consumers can easily find these assets and the colleagues who have created them — enabling people to build off the work of others and driving collaboration.

  • Find Data, No Matter Where it Resides: Alation can also help enterprises that are looking to move workloads to Snowflake’s cloud data platform. Alation provides a unified view of data, no matter where it resides — making it easier to determine what data should move and what data should stay, and giving data consumers a consistent experience through the migration and beyond.

Building a Better Airline with Data

Leading enterprises are leveraging Alation with Snowflake to make data-driven decision making an seamless part of the business. Finnair, the largest airline in Finland, has the goal of becoming the “most efficient, reliable, and personable travel company in the world,” according to Finnair’s Head of Data, Minna Karha. And to accomplish that, Finnair is focused on creating a data culture that leverages data to improve every facet of the business — from personalizing offers to customers to predicting how weather will affect flight delays, and preparing for recovery.

As part of the effort to drive data culture, Finnair is leveraging Snowflake as the modelled data layer where the analysts can query and analyze data, and Alation’s data catalog to create one place to find and manage all of the data within the company. Alation also gives Finnair clear control over the data, what remains internal, and what can be shared with external parties.

A Platform for Data Intelligence

Alation provides the industry’s leading data catalog and is pioneering the evolution of the data catalog to become the platform for data intelligence. For a deeper dive into the evolution of the data catalog, watch the presentation from Alation’s CEO and Co-Founder, Satyen Sangani, from this year’s MIT CDOIQ Symposium.

    Contents
  • Building a Better Airline with Data
  • A Platform for Data Intelligence
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