Alation + Databricks: Inviting More People to the Lakehouse

Today we are excited to announce our support for SQL Analytics, the latest innovation from Databricks, and deepened support for Lakehouse, the Databricks architecture paradigm that combines the best of data lakes and data warehouses. Built on Delta Lake, SQL Analytics allows analysts, data scientists, and engineers to build dashboards and reports on their data lake and easily share those within their organization, without the need for separate BI tools.

Alation already made it easy for anyone to quickly and easily find data within the Databricks Lakehouse. Now, Alation takes advantage of the performance boost provided by Databricks SQL Analytics to make running queries even faster. Alation also makes collaboration on data seamless, helping everyone from business users to data scientists to work together. Finally, Alation makes it easy to embed data governance into activities of data consumers, enabling enterprises to implement data governance across the Databricks Lakehouse.

Query Data Faster

Alation enables anyone to easily query data within Lakehouse with Alation Compose. Now Alation takes advantage of the new SQL Analytics high-performance Photon engine to make running queries even faster. As data consumers query relevant data in Databricks Lakehouse, Alation surfaces recommendations to related data assets, projections, policies, and guidelines to ensure that anyone can find, understand, and use data correctly.

Collaboration on the Databricks Lakehouse

With the release of SQL Analytics, Alation widens support of the Lakehouse paradigm making it easier for more people — from data analysts and data scientists to business users — to find data, build off of the work of others, and gain a unified view of data — no matter where it resides. Analysts can now use Alation to query the entire data set on Delta Lake via SQL with better performance with SQL Analytics endpoints that auto-scale seamlessly.

While more people are finding and leveraging data in the Databricks Lakehouse with Alation, Alation goes a step further, giving them the tools to seamlessly collaborate with one another. With Alation, data consumers can easily find these assets and the colleagues who have created them and ask questions of one another — enabling people to build off the work of others and driving collaboration.

Data Governance Across the Databricks Lakehouse

Alation provides an interface to guide users to the appropriate data consumption within the Lakehouse and across their other data sources — making data governance a part of the day-to-day activities of data consumers. The unified view that Alation provides can also help enterprises that are looking to move workloads to the Databricks Lakehouse. No matter where the data resides it is easy to determine what data should move and what data should stay, and giving data consumers a consistent experience through the migration and beyond.

Learn More About Alation and Databricks

Together, Alation and Databricks enable enterprises to empower more people to make data-driven decisions on trust data and drive data culture. See the presentation by Zurich North America at Spark+AI Summit 2020 to see how one of the largest providers of insurance solutions and services in the world implements a scalable self-service data science ecosystem with Databricks and Alation. And, to learn more about how Alation leverages Databricks Analytics, watch my presentation from Databricks: Data + AI Summit Europe.