Redshift Data Shares Extraction

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Applies from Alation version 2025.3.1 and Redshift OCF Connector version 1.11.1 onwards.

Amazon Redshift Data Shares allow secure, real-time sharing of data across clusters and AWS accounts without copying data. A producer publishes schemas, tables, and views, while a consumer accesses these objects in a read-only manner as if they were local.

The Redshift OCF Connector catalogs shared objects and builds lineage across Producer → Consumer → Downstream Sources, enabling complete visibility into shared datasets for governance and discovery.

Prerequisites

Permissions

See Redshift Data Shares Permissions for the required permissions to extract metadata from Redshift Data Shares.

Configure Redshift Producer Data Source in Alation

Ensure you configure the producer Redshift data source and perform metadata extraction in Alation before you configure the consumer Redshift data source. See Configure Redshift Data Source for instructions.

Configure Redshift Consumer Data Source in Alation

Configure the Redshift consumer data source, see Configure Redshift Data Source for instructions.

Once you configure your Redshift consumer data source, perform the steps in the following sections to extract the shared objects and generate lineage between the upstream Redshift producer data source and consumer data source.

Enable Data Shares Extraction

Perform the following steps to enable data shares extraction for your Redshift consumer data source:

  1. Go to the Settings page of your Redshift consumer data source.

  2. In the Metadata Extraction tab, go to the Customize extraction scope (optional) section.

  3. Turn on the Extract Data Shares flag. When enabled, shared objects metadata is extracted from the following Redshift system tables:

    • svv_datashares

    • svv_datashare_objects

Configure Lineage Extraction

To configure lineage extraction for your Redshift consumer data source, perform these steps:

  1. Go to the Settings page of your Redshift consumer data source.

  2. In the Lineage Settings tab, go to the Manage Connections section.

  3. Click Add Upstream Connection and select the Redshift data source that contains the producer database from the dropdown.

  4. Click Save.

Perform Metadata Extraction

  1. Go to Metadata Extraction tab of your Redshift consumer data source.

  2. Perform the Metadata Extraction. See Metadata Extraction for instructions.

Limitations

Metadata Extraction

  • Shared views don’t display the complete DDL and exact SQL query in the view extracted within the Consumer.

  • Functions, Primary Keys, and Foreign Keys are not available to the consumer database, so it is not possible to extract this metadata.

Query Log Ingestion

  • Consumer databases are read-only, so QLI tables cannot be created in the consumer database. Therefore, users have to use custom queries for QLI. See Redshift QLI with Custom Queries for more information.

Lineage

When multiple direct lineage jobs are triggered simultaneously, the job execution will be blocked or significantly delayed. We recommend to schedule Redshift MDE on consumer DB at a non-conflicting time with others MDE jobs.