How to crawl Teradata

Updated September 04, 2024 16:30

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

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

Select the source

To select Teradata as your source:

In the top right of any screen in Atlan, navigate to +New and click New Workflow.
From the Marketplace page, click Teradata Assets.
In the right panel, click 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 Teradata credentials:

For Host, enter hostname of your Teradata instance.
For Port, enter the port number of your Teradata instance.
For Authentication, Basic is the default method.
For Username, enter the username created when setting up user permissions.
For Password, enter the password created when setting up user permissions.
Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to Teradata.
Once authentication is successful, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Atlan also supports the offline extraction method for fetching metadata from Teradata. 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 database.json, columns-<database>.json, and so on.
(Optional) For Bucket region, enter the name of the S3 region.
Once completed, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Complete the Teradata 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.
At the bottom of the screen, click Next to proceed.

Before running the Teradata crawler, you can further configure it.

On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:

To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Metadata. (This will default to no assets, if none are specified.)
To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Metadata. (This will default to all 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.
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.

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

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

To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.
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! 🎉