Overview¶
Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation
Enhanced Connector Enhanced connectors add extended capabilities and require a separate entitlement in addition to your Alation platform license.
Available from Alation version 2025.3.2
The Matillion connector is available only for Alation Cloud Service deployments.
The connector uses Matillion’s REST API, authenticated with a client ID and client secret, to build lineage charts between source and target systems in Matillion ETL instances. It supports only Matillion Data Productivity Cloud.
Important
The Matillion connector extracts only lineage information. It doesn’t perform metadata extraction (MDE), query log ingestion (QLI), or data sampling and profiling.
To obtain table and column metadata, catalog each database (the source and the target) as its own data source in Alation.
The connector is distributed as a .zip package for upload and installation in the Alation application. To obtain the connector, contact the Forward Deployed Engineering team or your Alation Account Team.
Team¶
You may need assistance from the following administrators to install and configure this connector in Alation:
Alation Server administrator:
Installs the connector.
Enables and configures lineage extraction.
Matillion administrator:
Provides the API URLs for accessing Matillion.
Creates a service account for Alation and provides the API credentials for authentication.
Scope¶
The table below shows which metadata objects are extracted by the Matillion connector and which operations are supported.
Feature |
Scope |
Availability |
|---|---|---|
Authentication |
||
API client ID and secret |
Basic authentication using an API client ID and secret |
Yes |
Metadata Extraction (MDE) |
Not applicable |
|
Catalog Features |
||
Sampling and profiling |
Not applicable |
|
QLI |
Not applicable |
|
Compose |
Not applicable |
|
Lineage |
||
Direct lineage |
Auto-calculation of source lineage based on metadata extracted from Matillion |
Yes |
Cross-System Lineage |
Calculation of lineage across data sources |
Yes |
Table-level lineage |
Calculation of lineage data at the table level |
Yes |
Column-level lineage (CLL) |
Calculation of lineage data at the column level |
Yes |
Transformations metadata |
Extraction of transformation information from Matillion |
No |
Supported Matillion Source and Target Types¶
In Matillion ETL, jobs move data from a source to a target. These terms define where data is read from and where it’s written.
Source: Where the data comes from (for example, table/view, file, or API).
Target: Where the data is written after extraction or transformation.
The Matillion connector supports lineage extraction from the following sources and targets:
Sources:
SQL Server
PostgreSQL
Targets:
Snowflake
Note
These source and target data sources must already be cataloged in Alation with working connections before lineage extraction can succeed. The Matillion connector does not extract metadata from these data sources directly: it only creates lineage relationships between already cataloged objects.
Currently, only Snowflake is supported as a target. If your Matillion transformation pipelines write to other data warehouses, lineage extraction will not work. This is a limitation from Matillion.
The Use of Matillion APIs¶
The table below lists the Matillion API endpoints the connector uses to extract lineage metadata.
Type |
API Endpoint |
Description |
|---|---|---|
Authentication |
|
Gets OAuth2 access token using client credentials flow for authentication. |
Projects |
|
Retrieves projects from Matillion with pagination. |
Lineage events |
|
Retrieves lineage events from Matillion within specified time ranges with pagination for populating the project name in the dataflow content. |