Announcing Collate 1.11
We're excited to announce Collate 1.11, the latest release of our managed OpenMetadata service—and a significant leap forward in AI-powered semantic intelligence. This release introduces:
AskCollate - our conversational AI assistant that brings natural language not only for understanding and querying your data, but also for managing and governing your data – available through both web and chat.
Collate SQL Studio - lets you generate and visualize SQL queries, enabling you to explore and understand both your metadata and data from a single product.
Collate Custom Governance Workflow Builder - gives you unprecedented control over approval processes and cross-environment automation
Collate Data Quality as Code, Alert Notification Templates, Browser Extension, and other feature enhancements help boost productivity and deliver trusted, high quality data to your organization.
AskCollate
AskCollate is a conversational AI interface that brings natural language data management and query capabilities to your metadata and data. Not only can you ask questions about ownership, lineage, and quality, you can also manage your data conversationally. Create glossary terms, generate quality tests, and run root cause analysis, all in chat. You can also query your actual data and generate visualizations—while adhering to user access controls and authorization–all through conversational interactions that understand the technical and business meaning and relationships within your data ecosystem.
Library of capabilities: Access catalog discovery, lineage exploration, quality testing, root cause analysis, BI visualizations, and more. Don’t just understand your data, but actively manage your data easily with AI assistance, all in natural language
Semantic understanding: Navigate complex metadata relationships using AI that understands your data's context and connections to ensure accuracy of answers for people, applications, and AI systems
Query and visualize data: Talk with your data to get quick insights. Conversationally generate SQL queries from natural language, execute them, and create charts—all within the chat interface alongside your metadata
Permission-aware responses: Automatically respects user permissions, only surfacing information you're authorized to access, both for your data and metadata!
Why this matters: Data consumers waste hours searching documentation, pinging teammates on Slack, and navigating complex interfaces to find basic information. Technical barriers and data understanding gaps prevent business users from accessing the insights they need. AskCollate democratizes data access by letting anyone ask questions in plain language, dramatically reducing time-to-insight and eliminating dependency on technical team members for routine queries.
AskCollate Slack Integration
Bring AskCollate's AI capabilities directly into your team's workspace with a native Slack integration. Answer data questions where conversations already happen, creating a self-service data hub within your communication tools.
In-channel responses: Get answers to data questions directly in Slack channels without switching platforms
Threaded conversations: Maintain context with follow-up questions in organized conversation threads
Common query automation: Automatically answer recurring questions about pipeline status, data quality, and table ownership
Team visibility: Share insights and answers with team members in collaborative workspace environments
Why this matters: Data teams are constantly interrupted with the same questions: "When will my pipeline run?", "Who owns this table?", "Did the quality test pass?". These interruptions fragment productivity and create response delays across time zones. By embedding AskCollate in Slack, your organization creates a 24/7 self-service data assistant that reduces interruptions, speeds up responses, and scales knowledge sharing across the entire team.
Collate SQL Studio
SQL Studio transforms Collate into a data exploration studio where users can write and execute SQL queries directly against their data warehouses. Combine metadata context with live data access to enable faster analysis and troubleshooting workflows.
Bring Your Own Connection: Users authenticate with their own credentials, ensuring data access respects existing warehouse permissions
Multi-warehouse support: Connect to Snowflake, BigQuery, and Trino with the initial release
Integrated experience: Seamlessly transition from AskCollate-generated queries to manual refinement and execution
Why this matters: Analysts constantly context-switch between Collate for metadata discovery and separate query tools for data exploration. This fragmentation slows analysis and creates security gaps when sharing service account credentials. SQL Studio unifies these workflows while maintaining proper access controls through user-specific connections, enabling faster insights and ensuring that users only query data they're authorized to access.
Collate Custom Governance Workflow Builder
The Custom Governance Workflow Builder enables you to design and automate governance processes tailored to your organization's unique requirements. Create multi-step approval workflows with custom conditions, automated actions, and human reviews to enforce data quality standards and compliance policies at scale.
Visual workflow design: Build workflows with drag-and-drop interface using conditions, approval gates, and automated actions
Human-in-the-loop: Configure multi-reviewer thresholds (e.g., require 2 approvers), route tasks to the right teams, and define rejection rules
Why this matters: Manual governance processes create bottlenecks and inconsistencies as data teams scale. Organizations struggle to enforce standards across environments and keep external systems in sync with metadata changes. The Workflow Builder automates these processes with customizable rules that match your organization's specific policies, eliminating manual handoffs and ensuring consistent governance across all your data assets.
Collate Browser Extension
The Collate Browser Extension surfaces metadata context directly within external data tools like Snowflake, Tableau, and other platforms. Access information on data ownership, descriptions, data products, tiering, and other metadata without leaving your current workflow.
In-context metadata: View Collate information overlaid on external tools where your team already spends time through a pop-up interface
Zero context switching: Stay in your BI tool, warehouse console, or notebook while accessing enriched metadata
Key information at a glance: Instantly see ownership, PII classifications, data quality status, and documentation
Why this matters: Users working in BI tools, SQL editors, and notebooks shouldn't need to constantly switch to Collate to find basic information about tables and columns. This context-switching breaks flow and creates friction that discourages metadata adoption. The browser extension eliminates this barrier by bringing metadata to where work happens, making governance insights seamlessly available without disrupting existing workflows.
Collate Alert Notification Templates
Notification Templates give administrators and users complete control over alert formatting and content. Customize email and Slack notifications with markdown, dynamic fields, and conditional content to match your organization's communication standards and information needs.
Full template customization: Design notifications using markdown with dynamic template fields (e.g., Hello {{ user }}!)
Channel-specific control: Configure different templates for email vs. Slack (e.g., include sample data in email, exclude from Slack)
Multi-level templates: Set organization-wide defaults with admin templates, customize per-team with user templates
Dynamic content insertion: Automatically populate notifications with entity-specific data like owner, domain, test results, and more
Why this matters: Generic, one-size-fits-all notifications lead to alert fatigue and ignored messages. Different teams need different information in different formats, and default notifications often include sensitive data or lack critical context. Custom templates ensure alerts are actionable, appropriately detailed for each audience, and aligned with your organization's branding—increasing engagement and reducing notification noise.
Data Quality as Code
The Data Quality as Code Python SDK integrates Collate's testing framework directly into ETL pipelines. Test data frames before loading tables, prevent bad data from reaching production, and report results back to Collate for centralized visibility.
Pre-ingestion testing: Run quality tests on data frames within transformation pipelines before writing to tables
Unified test management: Define tests once in Collate, execute them pre-ingestion in pipelines or post-ingestion on tables
Automatic result reporting: Test results from pipeline execution automatically sync back to Collate
Simplified API: Clean, intuitive SDK design inspired by Stripe—far simpler than Great Expectations
Why this matters: Traditional observability tools only test data after it's already in production tables, meaning bad data is discovered after the damage is done. Engineers using Great Expectations face complex APIs, scattered test definitions, and manual wiring for alerts. Data Quality as Code enables shift-left testing with centralized test management, preventing production issues while maintaining the single source of truth for quality standards in Collate.
Additional Enhancements
Impact Analysis The Impact Analysis table interface presents upstream and downstream dependencies with column-level granularity, customizable details (owners, domains, tiers), and filtering capabilities. Quickly identify impacted assets and stakeholders before making schema changes, then export results as CSV or PNG for sharing. Manage changes smoothly and reduce production incidents by showing exactly who to contact when issues arise.
Improved Explore Page with Sidebar The enhanced Explore page features an intelligent sidebar that displays asset details, lineage, and consumer information without requiring full page navigation. Preview key metadata and return to search results with a single click, eliminating the need to drill into asset pages for basic information. This keeps users in their search context while providing sufficient detail to make quick decisions.
Collate Pipeline Observability provides centralized visibility into data pipeline execution, run times, and operational health. It supports dbt and Airflow, with more pipeline orchestrators to come. Monitor pipeline performance across your data landscape and drill into individual pipelines to examine scheduling, execution statistics, models, tasks, and run history, giving engineering teams better operational control and faster issue resolution.
Data Quality Dimensionality enables one-click dimensional breakdown of data quality tests, automatically creating sub-tests for each distinct value in a specified dimension (e.g., country, product line). The feature includes automatic impact scoring to identify which segments contribute most to test failures. This accelerates root cause analysis by pre-computing dimensional breakdowns instead of requiring manual investigation queries.
Conclusion
Collate 1.11 transforms data management from a technical bottleneck into a collaborative, AI-powered experience. With conversational interfaces that democratize access, quality testing that shifts left to prevent production issues, and governance workflows that scale with your organization, your team can spend less time searching for answers and more time delivering insights. Whether you're asking questions in Slack, running BI visualizations in natural language, or customizing alerts to reduce notification fatigue, this release gives you the tools to work faster, govern smarter, and deliver more trusted data across your organization.
Ready to get started? Sign up for the Collate Free Tier of our managed OpenMetadata service, or visit the Product Sandbox to try out the product with demo data.