Another quarter has passed, which can mean only one thing—MANTA’s engineers have outdone themselves again and brought you a new MANTA release full of new scanners, features, and enhancements to make your MANTA experience even better. Let’s see what they have prepared for you this time.

Integration with Alation

You might remember that some time ago we teamed up with Alation, a data catalog provider, to help organizations achieve more effective data governance. Alation’s vision for building a data culture in an organization and making data an asset is particularly close to our hearts, so we couldn’t be more thrilled to have our lineage integrated directly into Alation’s data catalog. What does this mean for Alation users? From now on, they can display column-level lineage and transformation lineage directly in their data catalog without experiencing any disruptions. If the user would like to see more detailed lineage, they also have the option to seamlessly switch over to MANTA.

New Scanners

There’s never a new MANTA release that doesn’t add new scanners and enhance existing ones. The stars of this release, now available for testing, are Snowflake and Qlik Sense. 

Snowflake is a database scanner. Snowflake offers a powerful solution architected for the cloud. MANTA can connect to the Snowflake database, read all the metadata, and generate a detailed lineage visualization that can be viewed in MANTA.

Qlik Sense is our newest reporting scanner that provides insights to business analysts who use Qlik Sense’s data analytics platform. Adding this scanner to MANTA’s supported reporting tools means that we are now exploring new horizons of modern analytics.

Just a reminder: If a scanner is ready for testing, that means we are looking for pioneers willing to try out our new capabilities before anyone else. If you want to become a pioneer, just let us know. Quite a few customers are waiting to get their hands on new scanners, so you had better be quick!

We have also added quite a few improvements to the existing scanners. If you are a customer or partner, check out our release notes to see what’s changed.

Brand New Features: Meet the Single Script Visualizer and Perspectives

Single Script Visualizer

In response to our users’ requests to view lineage for one script, we are introducing the Single Script Visualizer (SSV). MANTA can now validate the lineage of a complex stored procedure or other analyzed process and provide users with an immediate preview of the lineage. Developers can easily see how a new procedure might affect data flows as code is written. Simply copy, paste, and preview the lineage. Scripts can also be provided to the SSV using a REST API.

Perspectives

The concept of data as a corporate-wide asset is something we will always get behind, but it’s not possible without a touch of personalization and giving users the option to organize their own metadata. After all, metadata critical for the finance department is not something that the IT department will necessarily make use of and vice versa. We are adding perspectives to the list of features (like the colors we added in the previous release and MANTA filters)  to help you overcome data overload and use lineage to your greatest advantage. Perspectives allow you to organize your lineage metadata into your own folders and hierarchies so you can have the information you care about handy without unnecessary clutter.

Admin User Interface Logging

We are always working on enhancing user experience, and with this release, we are adding the first implementation of the admin UI logging capability. This means that now you can perform direct log viewing and filtering in the same MANTA interface that you use for other administrative functions without looking for or manually filtering lengthy logs. Managing logs in one place lowers operational costs and boost productivity because now MANTA is making it simpler to search and navigate their contents.

We had fun working on and testing all the new features in this release, and now we hope they will improve your MANTA experience. Let us know how you like it, and keep up with us to see what the next release will bring—exciting things are waiting in the wings.

Any questions, comments, thoughts? Want to become a pioneer? Write to us at manta@getmanta.com.