Hi Alvin users and fans,

We hope you had a fantastic March! Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the exciting updates and enhancements we brought to Alvin during March. This month, our focus was on releasing Alvin 2.0 A huge amount of effort has gone into this main release. You can read more about the release and road forward here: https://www.alvin.ai/blog-posts/unlocking-the-potential-of-data-teams-with-alvin-2-0 

Below we will dive quickly into the main features and functionality of the Alvin Console!

New Features & Improvements

Search

Search is instantly summoned by hitting Cmd+K and ranked by the analytical usage. You can dive into the advanced search if you want to search by tags or refine the search by entity types.

Entity View

The entity view shows you quick-fire insight about i.e a table, which as it’s rowcount and how it’s used as well as description and labels. Nothing fancy but very useful! The entity view also breaks down usage by query types that gives more context and better understanding whether this table is part of a pipeline or is mainly used for analytical purposes.

Lineage View

The Lineage view has been redesigned in a way that still shows the list view and up/downstream of first levels but now it groups tables by the job and show the job type as well as last time the job ran. Clicking the head will review more job details!

Lineage Graph View

Workloads

Understand how your environment changes over time, what affects your overall spend and spot anomalies related to your Warehouse, orchestration and analytical usage. This one is hard to explain fully so we recommend heading to the docs or just signing up to try the demo for free. If you like it you can add your own stack within minutes as well.

You can read more in depth about all the features here: https://docs.alvin.ai/ 

Behind the Scenes: Tackling Bugs & Refining the Experience

We've also dedicated time to squashing pesky bugs and fine-tuning Alvin to ensure a smoother, more enjoyable experience for everyone. Some key accomplishments include:

  • User Management: User management has been completely rebuilt and revamped!
  • Dark Mode: A small but also big quality-of-life improvement that makes Alvin easier on the eye for those late night sessions
  • Looker integration improvements: The looker integration now is able to recover from lookml errors such as SQL expressions being wrong or incomplete. This means that we can process more lineage and give more context, while previously we would fail to produce even partial lineage for lookml. An interesting finding was that in larger looker deployments there is surprisingly large amounts of broken lookml.
  • Impact Analysis: Impact analysis has been rebuilt on the scalable foundation and now always returns timely and correct results for any size of lineage graph or data environment!

On the Horizon: What's Next for Alvin

We're always looking forward, and here's a sneak peek at what we're working on for the coming months:

  • SQL Lens and insights: Bring the power of the AST and SQL parser to the UI by showing the logical structure of the query. Additionally we will use this to locate problematic queries that i.e have unused CTEs, columns or patterns like cross joins or other performance culprits.
  • Grouping of Lineage: A commonly observed pattern in customer environments is using export tables ending with YYYYMMDD or using data diffing tools that create separate schemas. But all of these are really just either partitions or something representing the same table. At the moment these clutter the lineage graph as well as causing performance issues for large graph traversals. Fixing this issue will be a win win and it will also be customizable per customer.

Your Feedback Matters to Us!

We're committed to continuously improving Alvin, and your feedback is essential to our progress. We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the recent updates, or any other ideas you have. Just let us know by reaching out on email, LinkedIn or Slack.

Thank you for being a part of our journey!

The Alvin Team