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External Catalog Introduction

Audience: Application Admins and Governors

Content Summary: This page outlines prerequisites, an overview of the installation process, limitations, and external documentation for external catalog requirements. For a tutorial on connecting an external catalog, see the Configure External Catalog page.

If you want to use dbt Cloud to pull tags, column details, and data source details for your data sources, use the dbt Cloud integration.

Supported External Catalogs

Immuta supports the following external catalogs:

Introduction

Users who want to use tagging capabilities outside of Immuta and pull tags from external table schemas can connect Collibra or Alation as an external catalog. Once they have been connected, Immuta will ingest a data dictionary from the catalog that will apply data source and column tags directly onto queryable data sources. These tags can then be used to write and drive policies.

If users have another catalog, or have customized their Collibra or Alation integrations, they can connection through the REST Catalog using the Immuta API.

Users can also connect a Snowflake account to allow Immuta to ingest Snowflake tags onto Snowflake data sources.

Best Practice: External Catalog

Use a single catalog; having more than one can lead to multiple truths and data leaks.

Alation

Prerequisite

  • A catalog with tags that correspond to your Immuta data sources

Installation Process

  1. Connect your Alation catalog to Immuta
  2. Link the Alation catalog to Immuta data sources
  3. When changes are made to the external catalog, refresh external tags

Collibra

Prerequisites

  • A physical Data Dictionary with assets that correspond to your Immuta data sources
  • The username and password of a user with the Global role: Catalog or Catalog Author.

Installation Process

  1. Connect your Collibra catalog to Immuta
  2. Link the Collibra catalog to Immuta data sources
  3. When changes are made to the external catalog, refresh external tags

Custom REST Catalog

For more details about using a custom REST catalog with Immuta, see the Custom REST Catalog Interface Introduction.

Prerequisites

  • A catalog with tags that correspond to your Immuta data sources
  • The Immuta API

Installation Process

  1. Connect your custom REST Catalog to Immuta
  2. When changes are made to the external catalog, refresh external tags

Snowflake Tag Ingestion

Prerequisites

  • A Snowflake user who has, at minimum, the ability to set the following permissions:

    1. GRANT IMPORTED PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE snowflake
    2. GRANT APPLY TAG ON ACCOUNT

  • Snowflake Enterprise Edition or higher

Installation Process

  1. Configure Snowflake tag ingestion
  2. When changes are made to the tags in Snowflake, refresh external tags

External Catalog Behaviors

  • Tags ingested from external catalogs cannot be edited within Immuta. To edit, delete, or add a tag from an external catalog to a data source or column, make the change in the external catalog.
  • You can configure multiple external catalogs within a single tenant of Immuta, but only one external catalog can be linked to a data source.