Write Queries

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Compose is the Alation query tool. You can access Compose either through your web browser or through downloading the Alation Compose app to your computer. Regardless of where you access Compose, the backend is the same and so all of your data is the same.

Like Catalog, Compose connects to most relational data sources. This means you can query Hive, Amazon Redshift, Oracle, and more, all from the same query tool. Alation is an interface for querying the data source directly, so language specifications and error messages all come directly from the data source.

Because Alation is a web-based tool, your workspace is accessible from any machine, any operating system, at any time.

You have to be connected to the Internet to send the query to execution, but you don’t need to be connected to the internet while your query is running. All queries get executed on the secure server in your company’s firewall. You can start a query, exit the browser, shut down the computer, even spill coffee on the hard drive. No matter what happens, the next time you connect to Alation, from any machine, your query results will be waiting for you.

Publishing a query significantly boosts its visibility. If you think your query may be useful to your colleagues at some point, make sure to publish it to make it easier for them to find.

In versions 2022.4 and earlier, anyone can find any query on data sources they have access to (and run any query if the Viewer role is not enforced). In versions 2023.1 and later, granular query permissions give you control over who has access to view, run, and edit individual queries.