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. (If you are also using a private network for Microsoft SQL Server, you will need to set that up first, too, for your Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon RDS or Amazon EC2 instance.)

To crawl metadata from Microsoft SQL Server, review the order of operations and then 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 SQL Server 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 Offline 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 (or PrivateLink endpoint for your Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon RDS or Amazon EC2 instance).
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.

Offline extraction method

Atlan also supports the offline extraction method for fetching metadata from Microsoft SQL Server. This method uses Atlan's metadata-extractor tool to fetch metadata. You will need to first extract the metadata yourself and then make it available in S3.

To enter your S3 details:

1. For Bucket name, enter the name of your S3 bucket or Atlan's bucket.
2. For Bucket 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 Bucket 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.

• To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Metadata. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
• To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Metadata. (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. You can also specify the following system tables to exclude from crawling — sys*, MSmerge*, dbo.sys*, MSrepl*, IH*, MSpeer*, cdc.*, MS*history, MS*agent, MSdist*, MSpub*, MSsubcri*, MSdbms*, MSdynamic*, and MSagent*. Note that this is not an exhaustive list, for more information refer to source documentation.
• For Advanced Config, keep Default for the default configuration or click Custom to configure the crawler:
  • For Enable Source Level Filtering, click True to enable schema-level filtering at source or click False to disable it.
  • For Use JDBC Internal Methods, click True to enable JDBC internal methods for data extraction or click False to disable it.

Run the crawler

To run the Microsoft SQL Server crawler, after completing the steps above:

1. To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.
2. You can either:
   • To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
   • To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule Run button.

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