Updating Object Mentions

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

In Alation is it possible to reference the catalog objects by @-mentioning them in rich text fields.

Alation saves these references by wrapping the information on the object into the HTMLtag <a> and embedding this tag in the field value.

Before V R5

In releases before V R5 (5.9.x), the embedded <a> tag included the title of the referenced object. For example:

<a data-oid=5 data-otype="table" href="/table/5/">table.title</a>

To keep the mentioned/referenced objects up-to-date, Alation would update these embedded tags every time the title of the object changed. This update was propagated with two asynchronous Celery jobs for every update being put and processed in the default queue of Celery workers.

Unfortunately, Alation ran into a performance issue with this approach, as the more references had to be updated, the larger number of corresponding Celery jobs would have to be triggered. If a large amount of catalog data was loaded using the public API, the number of references to be updated would kick off so many update mentions Celery jobs that the queue would overload and stall.

Changes in V R5

Starting with V R5 (5.9.x), Alation stores object references differently aiming at a more effective handling of large volumes of catalog data.  The <a> tag now includes only the reference of the object without storing any data about it (that is, it no longer stores the title):

<a data-oid=5 data-otype="table" href="/table/5/"></a>

Instead of triggering the Celery “update mention” jobs, Alation now uses the backend APIs to fetch the current name and title of the referenced object whenever it is rendered in the UI. Deprecation of the “update mention” Celery jobs in R5 allows us to keep the Celery queue healthy and moving when a large number of object references has to be updated.