Alation and Paxata have announced a partnership and integration to simplify the establishment of trust in the data lake. Alation is a provider of software for collaborative data cataloging to enable analysts and information stewards to search, query and collaborate for faster, more accurate insights. Paxata provides an enterprise-grade, self-service, scalable, intelligent platform that enables business consumers to quickly transform raw data into ready information.
Together, the companies aim to enable data consumers to quickly discover and profile data in both raw and compressed formats, so trust in data can be established no matter how that data is distributed — within a single data lake, across data lakes on-premises or within hybrid or multi-cloud data lake environments.
As the market for next-generation information management solutions has evolved, it has become clear that there is synergy between data preparation and data cataloging. The new partnership offers an emphasis on ease of use via intuitive user experiences and a focus on collaboration to help bring self-service data preparation to analysts, said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, co-founder and chief product officer, Paxata.
Self-service data preparation in the data lake requires that users can trust the data and understand the nuances of its path from raw files into prepared structures, repeated queries, shared algorithms and eventually distributed dashboards and reports. Governance for Insight ensures that this context around how data was ingested and prepared is captured at each stage of the data pipeline and shared with data consumers to drive insights, based on trust in both the data and the algorithms that transform it into insights.
Many organizations have filled their data lakes with data, but still struggle to find the information they need and then to efficiently prepare the necessary data assets, agreed Aaron Kalb, head of product, Alation. The partnership is intended to give users of all abilities the ability to open any file in the data lake — whether it’s raw or compressed, JSON, Parquet, or Avro — and see what’s inside.
The integration between Alation and Paxata also introduces a new “click-to-profile” data discovery feature to reduce the time it takes to understand and trust raw and compressed files. Users can start their data discovery in the Alation Data Catalog, find a data asset and push it into Paxata’s Self-Service Data Prep Application, where they can profile and prepare data for analysis. In turn, Alation’s ability to automatically inventory data assets and collect their business context helps drive proactive recommendations for data governance and data usage that complement Paxata’s ability to support the self-service data wrangling needs of the data consumer.
For more information, go to alation.com and www.paxata.com.