Announcing Alation Tableau Edition

Today we’re announcing a new offering that dramatically extends our support for Tableau. We believe that this offering, Alation Tableau Edition, realizes the full promise of self-service analytics by allowing analysts to self-serve without making any of the errors of omission or commission that traditionally accompany an ungoverned data environment. We characterize this offering as Governance for Insight.

Governance for Insight is a new way of thinking about data governance that is strongly aligned with the change in workflows that we see with self-service analytics tools. Governance for Insight is embedded in the analytics process, not the IT department. It is inspired by the need of your executives and business decision makers need for consistent insights and accurate data. At the same time however, it provides IT and data stewards with the control they need to ensure that data is used in a correct, compliant manner.

In a data-driven organization (and these days most organizations must be data-driven to compete), data can’t be locked in silos or bogged down by complex and process-oriented tools. Alation makes data accessible in multiple ways.  First, because Alation runs in the browser, it is a lightweight application that can be used by anyone in your organization almost immediately. Second, because of simple, powerful search the Data Catalog provides a single point of reference across multiple systems.  Users know that if the data exists, it’s probably accessible from Alation.  Finally, given the broad and deep context inside of Alation’s catalog, users can easily assess whether the report, dashboard, query or table answers the question formed in their mind.

In the same way,  Alation Tableau Edition enables Governance for Insight and ensures the use of best practices because it works seamlessly and directly within the interface that Tableau users are already familiar with. Notifications are surfaced directly within your Tableau workbooks so there’s nothing new to learn.  New integrations with Tableau Data Sources, Projects and Tags enable data stewards who use Alation to communicate policies and recommendations consistently through Tableau, without getting in the way of the fast insights that Tableau users have come to expect.

The Best of Both Worlds

Here’s a brief summary of how Alation Tableau Edition works:

• Project Integration: The product offers native support for data governance processes in Tableau through Tableau Projects. Data stewards and data governance teams can use Alation to publish and automatically update the association of Tableau Data Sources with data governor approved Tableau Projects.

• Tableau Tags are integrated for communicating the context of data governance policies. Data Stewards using Alation can communicate context and best practices directly to data consumers in Tableau through automatically synchronized tags, immediately available to Tableau users as filtering criteria for finding and understanding Tableau Workbooks. These tags may be deeply described in Alation offering data consumers more context around their data.

• Deep impact analysis: Alation makes Tableau deeply data-pipeline aware by notifying Tableau data consumers by email when underlying changes in the source database or file structure has potentially affected the accuracy of their analysis.