Release Notes 4.13.0

Release 4.13.0

New Feature

  • Alation now makes itself available as a search option in browsers. For instance, in Chrome it will now be possible to type “myalationhost.com” and press Tab to search Alation directly from the Chrome address bar.

Improvements

  • Tableau permissions mirroring no longer requires admin access for the service account.

  • Catalog page layouts have been improved for a more pleasing and consistent catalog browsing experience.

  • Admins can now confirm a user’s email address from the admin user management screen. In the case where email delivery is failing (usually because the email server is not configured properly), this allows admins to manually confirm the user so they can log in. (While only admins can use this functionality, end users directly benefit; we thought you’d like to know :).

Bug Fixes

  • Catalog Sets now show up in search with the ‘Recently Visited’ filter (clock icon).

  • It is now possible to easily delete Custom Fields in Internet Explorer. Previously a UI glitch made this challenging.

  • Data Dictionary Upload now works for non-ASCII characters. Previously, they’d show up strangely.

  • Now scheduled queries do not execute while their author is suspended. They will run again on their regular schedule if the author is activated again. Previously, scheduled queries for a user would continue to run after they were suspended.

  • Hovering over a truncated Hive table data location or Data Source URI in the sidebar of the catalog page will now show the full location in a peek, with the ability to select and copy it. Previously, it was challenging to see the full form.

  • Search indexing now continues to work overall even if a particular object can’t be indexed for any reason. This means search will work more reliably.

  • It is now possible to profile individual columns on Oracle Data Sources.

  • Allie Auto-titling now works for object names with spaces (e.g “bg tbl”) . Previously it would only recognize names with “_” (e.g. “bg_tbl”).

  • It is now possible to disable notifications for weekly metadata changes. Previously, there was a UI error while attempting to disable notifications.

  • Users can now upload and download a data dictionary without any error even when Cyrillic characters are used in Custom Fields.

  • You can now go to the “Other” tab in your User Preferences to see and set Excel export options for specific environments (for instance, to optimize for Mac or Windows).

  • We no longer create catalog pages for temp tables. Previously, when a user ran a CREATE TEMP TABLE query from Compose, we created a catalog page for it, which was confusing intrinsically and caused further confusion in the Lineage graph.

  • The “Ask a Colleague” (?) button is now visible everywhere it used to be. In 4.12 it disappeared from some locations.

  • Alation now supports non-ASCII characters in usernames.

  • You can now use the keyboard to highlight the “File Systems” facet in Quick Search, and select it using Enter.

  • You can now edit Description and Custom Rich Text Fields from within the Advanced Search interface.

Admin Release Notes

Improvements

  • The Lexicon page is no longer partially obscured by the site’s top banner. The backup schedule can now be changed.

  • -p option has been added to alation_conf so you can pretty print the details on which config options are available and what they do.

  • The MySQL JDBC driver has been upgraded to 5.1.43.

  • QLI for Hive Datasources with keytab-based Kerberos authentication is now supported.

Bug Fixes

  • The user signup page will not appear if you’ve chosen Single Sign-On for authentication (SAML).

  • It is now possible to activate/suspend a user who is not one of the top 100 in the list, without the whole list disappearing.

  • For SAP HANA Data Sources, _SYS_BIC is now extracted when Alation extracts all schemas. Previously, this was considered a system schema and not extracted by default.

  • Now, when a Tableau workbook owner changes, the catalog will reflect that change upon re-extraction.