Overview¶
Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation
Available from Alation version 2025.3.2
The connector is available as a Zip file that can be uploaded and installed in the Alation application.
To get the enhanced connector for Matillion contact the Forward Deployed Engineering team or ask your Alation Account Team.
Important
Lineage-Only Connector: The Matillion OCF connector extracts lineage information exclusively. It does NOT perform metadata extraction (MDE), query log ingestion (QLI), or data sampling/profiling. For table and column metadata, you must configure and catalog the actual source and destination databases separately in Alation.
The connector uses Matillion’s REST API authenticated with its client ID and client secret to build lineage graphs between the sources and targets from Matillion ETL instances. The connector supports only Matillion Data Productivity Cloud.
Important
The Matillion OCF connector is only available for Alation Cloud Service deployment.
Team¶
You may require 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 this connector and which operations are supported.
Feature |
Scope |
Availability |
|---|---|---|
Authentication |
||
API client ID and secret |
Basic authentication using a client ID and client 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 (e.g., table/view, file, or API).
Target: Where the data is written after extraction or transformation.
The Matillion OCF connector supports lineage extraction from the following sources and targets:
Sources:
SQL Server
PostgreSQL
Targets:
Snowflake
Note
These source and destination 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.
Note
Currently, only Snowflake is supported as a destination. If your Matillion pipelines write to other data warehouses, lineage extraction will not work. This is a limitation from Matillion.
The Use of Matillion APIs¶
The following table lists Matillion API endpoints used by the connector to extract metadata from Matillion.
Type |
API Endpoint |
Description |
|---|---|---|
Authentication |
Gets OAuth2 access token using client credentials flow for authentication. |
|
Projects |
{matillion_base_url}/dpc/v1/projects |
Retrieves projects from Matillion with pagination. |
Lineage events |
{matillion_base_url}/dpc/v1/lineage/events |
Retrieves lineage events from Matillion within specified time ranges with pagination for populating the project name in the dataflow content. |