DBT Add-On OCF Connector: Overview¶
The DBT OCF connector was developed by Alation and is available as a Zip file that can be uploaded and installed in the Alation application.
Create a ticket with Alation Support about receiving the DBT OCF connector package from Alation.
The DBT connector can be used as an add-on to a primary OCF connector to extract and catalog descriptions from DBT target tables, views and columns. Currently, the DBT add-on is available for:
Snowflake OCF Connector
Redshift OCF Connector
PostgreSQL OCF Connector
The DBT add-on is compatible with Alation release 2022.4 and later.
The DBT add-on cannot be used as a stand-alone connector as it works only with primary connectors listed above and shares the user interface of primary connectors.When the DBT add-on is configured for a primary connector, MDE will extract descriptions from DBT along with the metadata from the primary data source.
Team¶
You may need the assistance of your DBT administrator to configure the DBT add-on
Alation Administrator:
Installs the connector.
Configures the DBT add-on in the primary data source settings.
DBT Administrator:
Provides the JDBC URI to access metadata in DBT.
Provides access to projects to extract metadata.
Scope¶
The table below shows which metadata objects are extracted by this connector and which operations are supported.
Feature |
Scope |
Availability |
---|---|---|
Authentication |
||
GitHub personal access token |
Authenticate on the GitHub storage using a personal access token |
Yes |
Basic (AWS access key and secret key) |
Authentication with AWS access key and secret key |
Yes |
AWS STS authentication |
Authentication with an AWS STS access key and secret key |
No |
Metadata Extraction (MDE) |
||
Default MDE |
Extraction of metadata based on default extraction queries in the connector code |
Yes |
Custom query-based MDE |
Extraction of metadata based on extraction queries provided by user |
No |
Extracted metadata objects |
||
Table descriptions |
Description of the DBT target table descriptions |
Yes |
Views descriptions |
Descriptions of the views |
Yes |
Column descriptions |
Description of the columns |
Yes |
Catalog Features |
||
Sampling and profiling |
Not applicable |
|
QLI |
Not applicable |
|
Compose |
Not applicable |
|
Lineage |
||
Jinja code extraction |
Extraction of Jinja code from DBT into dataflow content |
Yes |
Automatic lineage generation |
Auto-calculation of lineage based on query history ingested from QLI and MDE |
Yes* |
Column-level lineage |
Calculation of lineage data at the column level |
N/A |
* Lineage is supported for Snowflake (Tables, Views, Ephemeral and Incremental) and Redshift (Views) datasources. For incremental models, the user must perform the QLI for the first run of lineage generation. The lineage between the source table and the target table will not be available.