The Alation Data Catalog

Boost analyst productivity with

the world’s first collaborative
enterprise data catalog

The Problem Alation is Solving What Can Alation Do For You?

Organizations are struggling to keep up with an
increasingly fragmented data environment. Data is
siloed across many different places, making it dif-
ficult to find relevant data quickly. Even when it is
discovered, it is likely not well described or classified,
leading to a lack of understanding, distrust and mis-
use. This creates risk when using data for making
business decisions. On top of that, there is too much
rework happening because people can’t find existing
queries or analyses.
So how can your organization really be data driven?
Alation is an enterprise data catalog that indexes all
your data in one single source of reference. Through
a powerful combination of machine learning and
human curation, metadata is documented, described
and classified. This creates the basis for people to
search, curate, collaborate and compose queries.
In turn, data analysts and data scientists can find,
understand, trust, use and re-use data so that they
can become more productive. Alation also empowers
data stewards to best serve the business by prioritizing
the most useful data to document and crowdsource
data knowledge from within the data community.

Benefits of Using Alation

• Increase analyst productivity. With Alation, analysts can find relevant data sets quickly with a simple
natural language interface, understand how to interpret data with a clear catalog page, trust the data
based on quality indicators and social signals, use the data with confidence for faster and more accurate
decisions, and reuse and build upon others’ work.
• Enable collaboration. Analysts and other data consumers can easily identify and communicate with data
stewards and subject matter experts.
• Minimize the risk of data mis-use. Data is curated by describing what it is, how to use it and classifying
what it relates to. Trusted data can be certified and surfaced in SQL queries or BI reports using Alation’s
TrustCheck feature.
• Remove IT bottlenecks. Users can self-serve and understand the context of data.
• More easily expose and interpret data policies. Endorsements, deprecations, and other policies are
surfaced directly within the analysts’ workflow, making it more likely that these policies are adhered to.
Four Major Applications of Alation
So data analysts, stewards, and IT can work together

SEARCH COMPOSE

Quickly find the most relevant data objects Create smarter and faster SQL queries with
with an intuitive Google-like search feature. feedback and suggestions from the catalog.

CURATE COLLABORATE

Be a good data citizen by endorsing, warning, Share your data knowledge with wiki-like
or deprecating data so other know what articles and ask questions with conversations
they can trust. right next to the data.

About Alation
Alation, the data catalog company, is building a data-fluent world by changing the way people find, understand,
trust, use and reuse data. The first to bring a data catalog to market, Alation combines machine learning and
human collaboration to bring confidence to data-driven decisions. More than 130 organizations, including
eBay, Exelon, Munich Re and Pfizer, leverage the Alation Data Catalog. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Alation
is funded by Costanoa Ventures, DCVC (Data Collective), Harmony Partners, Icon Ventures, Salesforce Ventures,
and Sapphire Ventures. For more information, visit alation.com.