Quick Set Up

It's an (almost) 3 step process 😉

Sign-up

Once we have confirmed that your Catalog space has been set-up, you can simply sign-up via this link:

Castor

Connecting your warehouse

For full details see Warehouses

🚀 For your warehouse onboarding, we need you to create a dedicated Catalog user in your warehouse and share credentials

Not to worry, this user will have very limited access: it will only be able to access your metadata and not your data itself !

To do list:

• Find the right person in your organisation to create a user on the warehouse

If you are not sure who can do that, ask yourself: "Who is responsible for the onboarding of new analysts?"

• Have them create user with the necessary rights

You can find all the details per technology here

• Share credentials to Catalog

Can be done directly through the app

What's next ?

Catalog will test the connexion, set up some settings and launch the first sync (usually takes a couple hours). We will notify when the first sync is finished 🎉

Catalog will then sync once a day with your warehouse, meaning that whenever a table is modified, it will show up in Catalog the next day !

Connecting your BI tool

For full details see BI Tools

🚀 Your BI tool onboarding (see supported technologies here), can either:

• Be Catalog managed: you give us admin credentials and you have nothing else to do

• Be client managed: you use the castor-extractor package (which we provide for you) to extract the information we need and you then send them over to Catalog

Client managed BI tool integration does require some work on your part, but this way we do not get access to your data ! We will only see your metadata 😊

Catalog managed

You should securely share with us credentials with access to your tools API. We will use those credentials to extract your tools metadata once a day. During onboarding, we will let you know once the first sync is completed !

Client managed: during your trial

We will perform a one-shot load of your BI tool's metadata

To-do list:

• Find the right person in your organisation who has access to your tool's API

• Have them run the package locally, or duplicate our Colab Notebook to perform extraction

• Share output files through Slack or email

What's next ?

We will upload the output files and notify you when it is completed 🎉

Client managed: once your trial is over

To regularly sync your BI tool's metadata, we will ask you to schedule the extraction of the metadata and to push the files to a Catalog provided GCP bucket. Sync can be done at your desired frequency, up to 1x/day.

We will provide you with with credentials, Catalog IDs, and the python scripts to push to GCP (in the castor-extractor package).

Other integrations

DBT

From DBT, we extract all existing documentation and tags. If you are using DBT, but have completed no documentation, no need to it set up ! Else:

🚀 For your trial onboarding, this is very quick: you just need to send us (via Slack or email) your DBT manifest

🤝 Once your trial is over, we will ask you to schedule a push of your manifest to a GCP bucket we will provide for you

Slack App

🚀 This is super quick: just follow the steps from the Coalesce Catalog app and get your Slack Admin to approve.

Microsoft Teams App

• Activating the connector from the Coalesce Catalog Integrations page is easy, just follow the steps!

• A Microsoft 365 admin will be required during the process to grant the necessary permissions

What if a technology isn't covered ?

Whether your warehouse or your BI tool technology is not listed as one of our integrations, we've got you covered with Warehouse API and Dashboard API. Basically, we provide a list of the necessary metadata we need to get things to show up in Catalog. You should explore the metadata you can access and format it into our templates.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, just try filling in a couple examples by hand. This way, you will be able to test out Catalog's main functionalities.

📣 Please reach out to the sales for more details !

Settings

These settings are managed by Catalog. At any point in time, you may wish to view/edit them, please reach out 📣

Account Settings

Account domains

This settings determines who is able to create an account linked to your Castor Space.

We set it up based on the email addresses of those we have been in contact with from your organisation.

We can modify it for you at any time and we even support multiple domains.

Sign-in strategies

By default, users with the right domain can use Google SSO or sign-up/in directly in the app.

Other strategies

Okta SSO can also be set-up (outside of trial phase). Instructions can be found here

Limitting strategies

Sign-in can be limited to a single strategy. We can modify for you at any time.

Default user role

At first, all new users signing up to Castor will be ADMINS by default.

Other possible user roles are CONTRIBUTOR and VIEWER.

We can modify this for you at any time.

Warehouse settings

Table allow/block

By default, we will include all databases, and schemas present in your warehouse. Our only constraint is that we can currently only handle a load c. 300,000 columns.

White/black listing is possible at database and schema level. We set it up for you at any time.

User classifications

Castor classifies users into 3 types: human, BI tool, other non-human. This impacts 2 features:

Popularity

Popularity is computed based on the number of READ queries performed by human and BI tools.

Read queries

Only human read queries are listed for each table's "queries" tab.