How to crawl Microsoft SQL Server

Once you have configured the Microsoft SQL Server user permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Microsoft SQL Server.

To crawl metadata from Microsoft SQL Server, complete the following steps.

Select the source

Select Microsoft SQL Server as your source:

1. In the top right of any screen, navigate to New and then click New Workflow.
2. From the list of packages, select MSSQL Assets and click on Setup Workflow.

Provide credentials

Choose your extraction method:

• In Direct extraction, Atlan connects to your database and crawls metadata directly.
• In S3 extraction, you need to first extract metadata yourself and make it available in S3.

Direct extraction method

To enter your Microsoft SQL Server credentials:

1. For Host enter the availability group listener name.
2. For Port enter the port on which Microsoft SQL Server is available (default is 1433).
3. For Username enter the username created when setting up user permissions.
4. For Password enter the password created when setting up user permissions.
5. For Database enter the name of the database.
6. Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Microsoft SQL Server using these details.
7. When successful, at the bottom of the screen click Next.

S3 extraction method

To enter your S3 details:

1. For S3 bucket name enter the name of your S3 bucket. If you are reusing Atlan's S3 bucket, you can leave this blank.
2. For S3 prefix enter the S3 prefix under which all the metadata files exist. These include database.json, columns-<database>.json, and so on.
3. (Optional) For S3 region enter the name of the S3 region.
4. Once completed, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Configure the connection

Complete the Microsoft SQL Server connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
2. (Optional) To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
   🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, nobody will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
3. (Optional) To prevent users from querying any Microsoft SQL Server data, change Allow SQL Query to No.
4. (Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Microsoft SQL Server data, change Allow Data Preview to No.
5. At the bottom of the screen, click Next to proceed.

Configure the crawler

Before running the Microsoft SQL Server crawler, you can further configure it.

• Select assets you want to include in crawling in the Include Metadata field. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
• Select assets you want to exclude from crawling in the Exclude Metadata field. (This will default to no assets, if none are specified.)
• To have the crawler ignore tables and views based on a naming convention, specify a regular expression in the Exclude regex for tables & views field.

Run the crawler

You can now run the Microsoft SQL Server crawler.

• At the bottom of the screen, click Run to run the crawler once, immediately.
• Click Schedule & Run to schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets in Atlan's assets page! 🎉