Hi Alvin users and fans,

We hope you had a fantastic September! 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 September.

New Features & Improvements

Entity page overview just got a whole lot more powerful: 

There is a huge amount of metadata available about entities. Cost, workloads, insights, tags, lineage, usage, queries, storage/volume and the list goes on, we get that it was confusing. Sometimes it’s even a bit confusing to us! Everything is really connected so we just released the first iteration of a more unified view so that all information regarding i.e a table is available in the same place. Here we can see a table overview with both catalog-style metadata like lineage and columns to more operational insights like anomalies, usage and test - all in one place!

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Lineage splash screen

The lineage explorer supports a variety of use cases, but is not very intuitive and requires manually setting up filters - we just et up a set of pre-built queries to make it easier to jump into a specific use case. As these are all filters that are part of the URL, it’s also easy for anyone to share results after starting with a use case and further diving into the lineage explorer. It’s addictive so don’t blame us if you find yourself spending a lot of time tracing lineage 😀

Table Cleanup

There is functionality in Alvin for finding potentially unused tables but there was not a clear sequence of steps for actions. We have working to create a more specific flow with clear outputs that can be used (i.e a list of statements to remove unused tables/models etc). This feature is currently available on request for customers so do reach out if you wish to try it out! The functionality is very much based on customer feedback to not just find tables with zero usage, but also very low usage, potentially indicating low business value. The tool has different steps, where it also will allow notifying potentially impact users without the data team needing to ask around in Slack! 

 

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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:

  • Integration / Validation improvements: Improvements to make sure that when adding connections, as much as possible of permissions are validated and communicated clearly so that the user will know what to fix, before a connection is added and synced.

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:

  • Events views: Unified and searchable/filterable views for all types of events within the platform from dbt tests, to anomalies to schema changes and even down to description and tag updates. 
  • Workflows: Ability to take action and create notifications based on certain events, like notifying users of schema changes.
  • Issues: Ability to create issues based on certain events and assign it based on priority or significance!
  • Actionability: A key feedback from our customers is that the product is good, but should be more actionable vs UI-driven. As these efforts show, we are investing heavily in this going forward and we are very excited to build on our current metadata model to provide this functionality to data teams!

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 replying to this email or reach out on LinkedIn or Slack.

Thank you for being a part of our journey!

The Alvin Team

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