Atlan

Atlan is an active metadata platform for modern data teams, that helps them discover, understand, trust, govern, and collaborate on data assets. Their product slogan is “Atlan – The Active Metadata Platform”.

Overview

The Atlan platform serves as a collaborative workspace for data teams, allowing organizations to catalog, discover, and govern data assets across cloud data warehouses, business intelligence tools, and data pipelines.

Atlan addresses what it describes as enterprise “data chaos”, the challenge organizations face managing data across dozens of tools and systems. The platform serves as what the company calls a “metadata control plane” that integrates with modern data infrastructure including cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks, as well as business intelligence and data science tools.

Architecture

Atlan distinguishes itself from traditional data catalogs through its “active metadata” architecture, which programmatically harvests metadata such as logs, query history, and usage metrics to automate governance tasks. This contrasts with passive catalogs that rely on manual metadata entry.

Atlan’s architecture emphasizes integration and automation over manual processes. The platform is designed to integrate with existing data infrastructure rather than requiring organizations to replace their current tools.

Features

The Atlan software platform provides several key functions:

Data Cataloging:

Automated indexing of data assets including tables, columns, and dashboards to enable search and discovery across an organization’s data infrastructure.

Data Lineage:

Visualization tools that track data flow from source to consumption, designed to assist with root cause analysis and impact assessments when making changes to data systems.

Data Governance:

Tools for managing access policies, masking sensitive data, and supporting regulatory compliance requirements such as GDPR and CCPA.

AI Governance:

Governance capabilities for AI models, including tracking the lineage of data used to train large language models (LLMs).

Connect

Please follow the CrateDB connector for Atlan documentation to learn how to connect and catalog CrateDB assets in Atlan. Connect your data across many more sources and destinations, see Atlan connector gallery.