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.