Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Enhanced Connector Enhanced connectors add extended capabilities and require a separate entitlement in addition to your Alation platform license.

The Purview RDBMS enhanced connector is used to catalog Purview assets in Alation. It extracts Purview objects such as accounts, collections, assets, and schemas. After extraction, users can search for and find Purview objects and curate the corresponding catalog object pages.

The connector is distributed as a .zip package that you upload and install in the Alation application. You can download the latest connector package from the Alation Customer Portal (Customer Portal > Connectors).

Team

You may need assistance from the following administrators to install and configure this connector:

• Purview Administrator

  • Creates a service account for Alation.

  • Provides the connection information.

  • Provides authentication information and assists in configuring authentication.

• Alation Server Admin

  • Ensures that Alation Connector Manager is installed and running (or installs it).

  • Installs the connector.

  • Creates and configures the Purview data source in the Alation catalog.

  • Performs initial extraction and prepares the data source for Alation users.

Scope

The following table summarizes the core catalog features supported by this connector.

Feature	Scope	Availability
Authentication
Azure AD token	Authentication with a service account using tenant ID, client ID, and client secret	Yes
Metadata Extraction (MDE)
Default MDE	Extraction of metadata based on the connector’s default extraction logic	Yes
Selective MDE	Extraction of metadata based on object selection in the connector	Yes
Extracted Metadata Objects
Account (Purview instance)	Purview account information	Yes
Collections	List of collections	Yes
Assets	List of assets	Yes
Schemas	Schema-level metadata	Yes
Sampling and Profiling
Not supported
Query Log Ingestion (QLI)
Not supported
Lineage
Intra-system lineage	Automatic lineage between Purview assets	No
Cross-system lineage	File source cross-system lineage	Yes
Compose
Customer-managed Alation instances	Compose for customer-managed Alation instances	Yes
Alation Cloud Service instances	Compose for Alation Cloud Service instances	Yes
SSO via OAuth	OAuth-based authentication in Compose	No

Object mapping

The connector maps Purview objects to the Alation object model as follows:

Purview object	Alation object
Account (Purview instance)	Data source
Collection	Schema
Asset	Table
Schema	Column