How to crawl Oracle

Updated September 04, 2024 16:29

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

To crawl metadata from Oracle, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Oracle as your source:

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

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.

To enter your Oracle credentials:

For Host Name, enter the host for your Oracle instance.
For Port, enter the port number of your Oracle instance.
For Username and Password, enter the credentials you created when configuring the permissions.
For SID, enter the Oracle system identifier for your database.
For Default Database Name, enter the database name (usually the same as the SID).
Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to Oracle using these details.

Atlan also supports the offline extraction method for fetching metadata from Oracle. 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:

For Bucket name, enter the name of your S3 bucket or Atlan's bucket.
For Bucket prefix, enter the S3 prefix under which all the metadata files exist. These include databases.json, columns-<database>.json, and so on.
(Optional) For Bucket region, enter the name of the S3 region.
When complete, at the bottom of the screen, click Next.

To complete the Oracle connection configuration:

Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
(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.
(Optional) To prevent users from querying any Oracle data, change Allow SQL Query to No. (Note: This option has no effect when using the S3 extraction method.)
(Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Oracle data, change Allow Data Preview to No. (Note: This option has no effect when using the S3 extraction method.)
At the bottom of the screen, click Next to proceed.

Before running the Oracle crawler, you can further configure it. (These options are only available when using the direct extraction method.)

You can override the defaults for any of these options:

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.

💪 Did you know? If an asset appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence.

To run the Oracle crawler, after completing the steps above:

To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks. (This option is only available when using the S3 extraction method.)
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 asset page! 🎉