BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, BIG DATA MANAGEMENT, MACHINE LEARNING
Globenewswire | April 05, 2023
Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, today announced expanded partnerships with Databricks, the lakehouse company, and dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, to extend knowledge, collaboration, and trust across the modern data stack. Joint customers can now easily integrate rich metadata from Databricks Unity Catalog and leverage a new connector that provides support for dbt Core and dbt Cloud in Alation. As a result, users have a better understanding of their data landscape and can view underlying data changes and transformations to power data intelligence.
In the modern data stack, data lives in a variety of source systems and formats in preparation for transformation and analysis. To find, understand, and trust data that spans multiple technologies across an organization, users need a single-pane-of-glass view of the most valuable data within their ecosystem. With these recent integrations, metadata is visible within Alation, enabling users to better understand the data being leveraged, as well as its historical use, to ensure business decisions are made on high-quality and trusted data.
“The combination of Alation plus Databricks Unity Catalog, and Alation plus dbt Cloud, brings much-needed data intelligence with critical components of the modern data stack,” said Diby Malakar, VP of product management, Alation. “Metadata offers invaluable context to data users seeking to better understand their data’s path and collaborate across the organization. We’re looking forward to growing our partnerships with Databricks and dbt Labs to help data teams stay on track, work together, and increase confidence in data-driven decisions.”
Power Self-Discovery with Databricks Unity Catalog
Alation connects to more than 100 data sources, including Databricks, dbt Labs, Snowflake, AWS, and Tableau. The expanded connector with Databricks Unity Catalog empowers joint customers to better understand data that lives in their cloud-based technology stack. Organizations that leverage Databricks, which is specifically optimized for cloud environments, process and transform massive quantities of data that span multiple workspaces and systems.
Now, with the expanded connector to Databricks Unity Catalog, joint customers can sample and profile data, and compose queries on data from the Databricks Lakehouse, directly in Alation.
Sampling provides a preview of a small slice of data, its structure, and how it can be used.
Profiling provides a high-level view on the statistics of the data, such as minimum, maximum, median, and null, enabling users to observe potential quality and fit at a glance.
Compose, Alation’s SQL query tool, enables users to search data sources with real-time warnings and lowers the barrier to entry with its autocomplete function that generates suggestions as users write queries.
Data engineers and data scientists will now benefit from increased self-service at scale, faster migration, and the ability to collaborate inside Alation with enhanced context around the systems being used.
“Whether you’re a data owner or user, you need to understand the context around the data being used to accelerate time to value and garner trusted insights,” said Ariel Amster, Director of Strategic Technology Partners at Databricks. “By integrating Unity Catalog with Alation, data teams can easily search across multiple sources and workplaces to power self-discovery and streamline governance. This is a critical step before leveraging any data set, to improve the accuracy of their predictive models, and we’re thrilled to further strengthen our partnership with Alation.”
Gain Visibility into Data Changes with dbt Labs
Metadata plays a key role in enabling data users to quickly search, discover, and understand their data within Alation – an especially important feature for data engineers as they prepare increasing quantities of data for analysis.
The new connector for dbt Core and dbt Cloud extracts dbt descriptions for curated data in Alation, as well as dbt lineage for data warehouses, such as Snowflake, Redshift, and PostgreSQL. As a result, business users can fully understand the changes and transformations made to underlying data. Now, users can navigate, search, curate, flag, tag, and view lineage for data assets built with dbt in one location, increasing productivity and producing higher-quality results. The integration builds upon Alation’s extensive partner network, which utilizes the Open Connector Framework (OCF), and further cements the company’s ongoing commitment to open extensibility.
Alation is a Platinum Sponsor at the Fivetran Modern Data Stack Conference, scheduled for April 4-5 in San Francisco, California. To learn more about how Alation enables the modern data stack, visit Alation’s booth (#4) to schedule a demo with the Databricks Unity Catalog and new dbt Labs connector.
Also, attend the “Look Before You Leap” session on April 4 at 2:30 p.m. presented by Mitesh Shah, vice president of market strategy at Alation, which will explore how to avoid clogged pipelines with data intelligence.
About Alation
Alation is the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation’s initial offering dominates the data catalog market. Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. More than 450 enterprises drive data culture, improve decision-making, and realize business outcomes with Alation, including AbbVie, American Family Insurance, Autozone, Cisco, Draft Kings, Exelon, Fifth Third Bank, Finnair, Nasdaq, Parexel, Pfizer, Salesforce, Virgin Australia, and Vista. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Alation has been named to Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list three times, is a 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Women, and recognized as a 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces™ in Tech. The company is backed by leading venture capitalists, including Blackstone, Costanoa, Databricks Ventures, DCVC, Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Icon, ISAI Cap, Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sanabil Investments, Sapphire, Snowflake Ventures, Thoma Bravo, and Union Grove.
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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, BIG DATA MANAGEMENT, DATA SCIENCE
Globenewswire | May 15, 2023
ThoughtSpot, the AI-Powered Analytics company, today announced a series of new product capabilities during their annual customer conference Beyond 2023, to help companies across the globe deliver modern data experiences that advance business outcomes and deliver impact. These new capabilities include new ways to search data, new connections to data sources and platforms, new ways to collaborate on analytics, and ways to experience all this power without even logging into a BI tool.
This includes:
Private preview of ThoughtSpot Sage, a new search experience that combines foundational language models and ThoughtSpot’s patented search technology
Integrations with common workplace productivity tools and office suites
Liveboard collaboration features
Availability of ThoughtSpot SaaS built on Google Cloud Platform
A series of new database connectors
New Data Modeling Studio, the latest feature in the Data Workspace
New embedded Liveboard features to deliver interactive data experiences
ThoughtSpot also announced Monitor for Mobile, delivering users proactive notifications pushed to their mobile device as KPIs change, paired with an explanation of the key drivers and change analysis, so users can make data-driven decisions whenever and wherever they are.
Introducing the modern data experience
We are at a defining moment in the history of computing. Generative AI and foundational language models have redefined how machines and humans interact, and in the process, unleashed a new era for the world of data. For the first time, people can interact, interrogate, and glean insights from their data as easily as they chat with a friend or colleague, with these insights going beyond the traditional BI tool and meeting users when and where they make decisions. Organizations face a new challenge, however, in ensuring this ease of interaction doesn’t sacrifice the specificity or accuracy required in an analytics context.
Since its founding, ThoughtSpot has always worked toward a mission of creating a more fact driven world through the power of search, AI, and self-service analytics. Now, with the rise of new technologies like GPT, combined with growing partnerships, new products, and new integrations, the entire data experience has been reimagined.
Experience your data in a new way
Today, we are introducing ThoughtSpot Sage, an AI-powered search experience that lets every user, regardless of technical skills, leverage foundational language models to get insights from their data through natural language search. Our patented dynamic search architecture paired with a foundational model delivers the flexibility of natural language with accuracy, governance and reliability your business expects. Currently in private preview, this includes:
AI-powered search: Users can search their data in natural speech
AI generated insights: Within seconds of searching, users receive AI generated insights accompanying their data results
AI search suggestions: Based on the data and insights served, AI will provide recommendations for where to drill down and questions to ask
Human-in-the-loop feedback capabilities: Allow users to provide feedback by correcting keyword tokens, training the machine learning system to learn and correct all future queries.
AI assisted data modeling for synonyms: AI and large language models make data modeling easier and faster by automatically generating synonyms for all data columns, giving time back to data professionals
“At Goldcast, our objective has been to empower our business users to make more data-driven decisions in their day-to-day. ThoughtSpot Sage enables every Goldcast team member to find insights by asking natural language questions, all while providing a trustworthy and well-governed experience. This truly makes self-service analytics a reality in our organization,” said Kishore Kothandaraman, Co-Founder, Goldcast.
Collaborate on your data in a new way
Complementing ThoughtSpot Sage and the new search experience are several enhancements to ThoughtSpot Liveboards that promote collaboration, efficiency, and data fluency. This includes:
Improved storytelling and interactivity with note tiles and custom sizing that can be used to add branding, explain confusing terminology, or provide context to the data. By utilizing notes, analysts can expand upon the data narrative and assist business users in quickly understanding and analyzing their data.
Cross-filters enable users to apply a filter in one tile to the rest of the Liveboard, ensuring consistency in analysis, and enhancing interactivity and ad hoc exploration for all users.
Parameters allow users to conduct “what if” scenario analysis.
New in-app commenting system allows users to leave feedback, collaborate, share ideas, and arrive at actionable recommendations, all without leaving ThoughtSpot.
Verified Liveboards Increase transparency and trust with data quality certifications for Liveboards.
Use new kinds of data
No matter where your data lives or what kind of data it is, you must be able to bring the modern data experience to it. Today, we are announcing new platform abilities and connectors that allow users to tap into new kinds of data from new places, providing our customers with greater flexibility and choice in how they build their stack and leverage ThoughtSpot as the experience layer. These deepening relationships and connectors across the ecosystem include:
The launch of ThoughtSpot built on Google Cloud Platform, establishing ThoughtSpot as the first independent analytics company built on GCP. Customers can choose where they want to build their AI-Powered Analytics platform. In addition to taking advantage of ThoughtSpot’s native GCP architecture, can purchase ThoughtSpot with Google credits on Google Marketplace, and make the most of their data living in Google Cloud.
New live query database connectors for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL; Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL; SQL Server, and a universal JDBC connector enables users to connect data with just a few clicks.
"Data has always been an intrinsic part of our business to deliver world-leading learning and engagement solutions for learners of all ages. By using the combination of ThoughtSpot and Google Cloud, we can deliver an entirely different analytics experience to our enterprise and education users, empowering them to engage with data directly,” said Jostein Håvaldsrud, CTO, Kahoot.
Model data your way
As companies democratize their data, their data modeling approach has never been more important in delivering accurate, trustworthy, reliable analytics. Data analysts, analytics engineers and data architects need modern tools to help their organizations deliver on the modern data stack and make the most of their investments.
ThoughtSpot’s new Data Modeling Studio, the newest addition to the Data Workspace, is a new visual model builder which makes it easy to create custom, trusted data experiences, using the tools and languages your data teams already know and love. Users can scale the impact of their work across ThoughtSpot environments by uploading reusable TML models, leverage SpotApps starter templates to set up new search environments in minutes, and create their own data models from scratch Other features include:
Model builder experience: designed with an intuitive drag-drop interface and guided UI that makes modeling data for analytics as easy as using your favorite app. Users can inherit existing joins from their database or create new joins through a guided UI, build guardrails for search by dragging and dropping relevant columns in your model, and scale data literacy across the business by adding custom formulas, adjusting attributes, and configuring column properties.
New data catalog integrations: Two-way integrations with Alation, Atlan and Collibra, as well as ThoughtSpot integrations with Metaphor and Data.World, deliver a new way to experience governed and trusted data by syncing established, rich contextual metadata from your data catalog into ThoughtSpot. This metadata appears alongside ThoughtSpot Answers in new knowledge cards, providing your teams with the context they need to build trust in their data, including descriptions, certification status, and related insights.
Model sync for dbt: dbt users can accelerate workflows by connecting directly to models already built in dbt. The sync automatically transfers updates made in dbt over to related objects in ThoughtSpot, keeping dbt as your singular source of modeling truth.
ThoughtSpot integration with Looker: Customers can model, transform, and define metrics in their data using Looker’s Semantic Model (powered by LookML) and Looker Modeler, giving them confidence and trust to empower their teams at scale. Then, anybody can use ThoughtSpot to explore and endlessly drill into this data with natural language search, embed business monitoring and anomaly detection, and create interactive Liveboards that take users well beyond static dashboards. The integration will be available to customers this summer.
Bring ThoughtSpot to where work gets done
No matter your stack, your business can only move as fast as your decision-making process takes. Actionable insights seamlessly integrated into your existing workflows is a game changer for scaling your data-driven business strategy. Today, ThoughtSpot has launched a series of new applications for your productivity suite that bring AI-Powered Analytics to where your work gets done.
New Slack integration: Users can share links from ThoughtSpot Liveboards into Slack and automatically generate rich visualizations. Users in Slack can then jump to where the visualization lives in ThoughtSpot for further exploration. With Liveboard previews in Slack, your team can determine if they want to continue the conversation in Slack or directly in your Liveboard with the new in-app commenting system. Currently in private preview, this integration will be available in the second half 2023.
New interactive Slack AI Assistant: Called ‘Spot,’ your new AI assistant will take any question you ask in natural language on Slack, and fetch you the answer and explanation within your Slack thread instantly. Spot works with file types like Excel and CSVs and can also be connected to cloud data platforms like Snowflake or Google BigQuery. Currently in private preview, ‘Spot’ will be available second half 2023.
ThoughtSpot Analytics for Excel: Offers a lightweight version of ThoughtSpot that does not require a ThoughtSpot login and works entirely in the browser leveraging the computing power of the laptop in front of you.
New integrations with Google Workspace: Three new applications embedded in Google Sheets and Google Slides, including ThoughtSpot Analytics Sheets and ThoughtSpot Connected Sheets available today, and integrations with Google Connected Slides, available in preview.
Deliver customized, interactive data experiences
ThoughtSpot Everywhere enables product builders to embed this entire modern data experience right into an app or product, driving new innovations, accelerating time to market, and delighting end users. Whether you want to create a new revenue stream, make an existing product stickier, or build an app to solve a specific internal use case, new ThoughtSpot Everywhere capabilities make delivering a modern data experience that feels like your company to any of your customers easier than ever before. These include:
An all-new Liveboard experience bringing more interactivity and control over your content including access to Liveboard Tabs, custom-sized tiles, and new Filter and Answer Explore capabilities for your end users.
A new styling framework that provides advanced CSS capabilities to bring your design language to life in your app.
Support for open-source version control systems like Git, making it fast and easy for developers to track changes, version control, and migrate ThoughtSpot content across deployments.
“ThoughtSpot has stepped up significantly on embedding capabilities through its ThoughtSpot Everywhere initiative, adding low-code development and automated deployment options to its Visual Embed SDK, JavaScript library, and REST API endpoints,” said Doug Henschen, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “These advances coupled with its Action Framework for business processes and no-code ThoughtSpot Sync options for pushing data to external apps helped to put ThoughtSpot on our 2023 Embedded Analytics ShortList™.”
Thoughts from the Top
“We’re on the precipice of a world where we no longer have to dumb ourselves down for machines. For the first time, machines are set to listen and partner with humanity on our terms and through our preferred user interface, natural language. Modern businesses want to run on reason built on data and logic, however, the language barrier between people and machines has meant making data insights and analytics accessible to everyone impossible. Foundational models change everything we’ve known to be true in the world of BI. Today, we bring continued innovation and partnership in helping companies embrace a new, modern data experience powered by responsible, ethical AI,” said Sudheesh Nair, CEO, ThoughtSpot.
“For the first time, the data experience is no longer defined by a choice between nuance and natural, power and performance, intuitive and impactful. The modern data experience brings all of this together, for everyone. While consumer grade UX and natural language has always been at the core of our product strategy, today’s developments in AI paired with our patented search experience and backend architecture, signal a new stage for taking advantage of the power of AI for analytics,” said Sumeet Arora, Chief Development Officer, ThoughtSpot. “Each of the new enhancements in this launch embrace the future of AI-Powered Analytics and enables organizations of all sizes to experience, collaborate, model, and access data in new ways that are personalized to the user and boost productivity.”
“With ThoughtSpot Sage, our engineers have brought the power of foundational language models together with our relational search engine to deliver a natural language search experience that automatically creates insights with verifiable accuracy and trust. Data discovery has never been so fast and easy. It’s truly bringing our vision of ‘Google for numbers’ to life,” said Amit Prakash, Co-founder and CTO, ThoughtSpot.
About ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is the AI-Powered Analytics company. Our mission is to create a more fact-driven world with the easiest to use analytics platform. With ThoughtSpot, anyone can leverage natural language search powered by large language models to ask and answer data questions with confidence. ThoughtSpot enables everyone within an organization to limitlessly engage with live data in any popular cloud data platform, making it easy to create and interact with granular, hyper-personalized, and actionable insights. Customers can take advantage of both ThoughtSpot’s web and mobile applications to improve decision-making for every employee, wherever and whenever decisions are made. With ThoughtSpot’s low-code developer-friendly platform, ThoughtSpot Everywhere, customers can also embed AI-Powered Analytics to their products and services, monetizing their data and engaging users to keep them coming back for more. Organizations like T-Mobile, BT, Snowflake, Exxon, Daimler, Medtronic, Hulu, Royal Bank of Canada, Nasdaq, OpenTable, Huel, and Nationwide Building Society rely on ThoughtSpot to transform how their employees and customers take advantage of data. Try ThoughtSpot today and see for yourself.
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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, BIG DATA MANAGEMENT, DATA SCIENCE
Prnewswire | April 28, 2023
Starburst, the data lake analytics platform, today announced a new integration with dbt Cloud, the fastest and most reliable way to deploy dbt. With the integration, which includes an enhanced adapter between dbt Cloud and Starburst's SaaS offering, Starburst Galaxy, dbt users can now easily build data pipelines spanning multiple data sources on one central plane.
As data becomes increasingly distributed, the ability to federate queries across disparate data sources has become critical for conducting lakehouse and data lake analytics. While migrating to centralize on a single cloud data warehouse is one option, most enterprise data is still spread across multiple platforms, including on-prem databases and object storage. With this integration, dbt users can easily federate that data across multiple disparate sources or access new data sources before it lands in their central data lake or warehouse.
"Combining the power of Starburst's data lake analytics platform with dbt Cloud, enterprise customers can more easily transform data wherever it lives without suffering through cumbersome and expensive ETL processes," said Harrison Johnson, Head of Technology Partnerships at Starburst. "This integration addresses the needs of the enterprise customer base, helping them get the most out of their existing systems and extending dbt's world class analytics engineering workflow platform to new cloud-first use cases without additional operational overhead."
Using a legacy ETL solution to transform and move data around using brittle, manually configured data pipelines is cumbersome, expensive, and can introduce risk. Yet, using a central cloud data warehouse for some use cases while other data exists in silos means organizations are not getting the most out of all their data. With this integration, dbt Cloud customers can get the most value out of all of their data with confidence, regardless of where it currently resides without adding the complexity of data ingestion (ETL) pipelines. This is a major benefit for dbt users who would need to otherwise rely on data engineering pipelines for ingestion.
"dbt enables data teams to work faster and more efficiently to bring order to organizational knowledge," said Nikhil Kothari, Head of Technology Partnerships at dbt Labs. "By combining the power of dbt Cloud with the flexibility of Starburst, we're empowering a new segment of users to easily create analytical data assets, without having to be constrained by where the data lives."
The new adapter is now generally available in dbt Cloud. In just a few clicks, customers can create a new dbt Cloud project, select Starburst as the data platform and connect. Within minutes, customers can make use of Starburst's high-performance query engine to transform data using dbt. To learn more about Starburst, its offerings and integrations, please visit starburst.io.
About Starburst
For data-driven companies, Starburst offers a full-featured data lake analytics platform, built on open source Trino. Our platform includes the capabilities needed to discover, organize, and consume data without the need for time-consuming and costly migrations. We believe the lake should be the center of gravity, and be the starting point for querying disparate data. With Starburst, teams can access more complete data, lower the cost of infrastructure, use the tools best suited to their specific needs, and avoid vendor lock-in. Trusted by companies like Comcast, Grubhub, and Priceline, Starburst helps companies make better decisions faster on all their data.
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