Collibra APIs

Using the Collibra APIs, you can build custom solutions that enable data intelligence across your enterprise. Whether creating applications to automate business processes, transform data, or communicate with external clients, the APIs help you build seamless solutions on top of the Collibra platform.

API visibility

The Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud exposes public APIs so you can build extensions. The APIs are safe, easy to use, and backwards/forwards compatible within the same major release. If a break does occur, it will only happen in the next major release and you will receive a deprecation message ahead of time.

You can find the list of APIs and documentation on the developer portal and in your environment at https://<your_collibra_platform_url>/docs/index.html.

For workflows, we also consider the following libraries as public:

  • Java.time.**
  • Java.math.**
  • Java.lang.**
  • Java.text.**
  • Groovy.**

We also use specific APIs internally to build our platform. These APIs are private and are intended for our use only. It is important to note that these APIs are not publicly documented and can break at any time.

API technologies

The Collibra platform provides two main technologies for public APIs:

  • Java APIs.
  • REST APIs.

The Java APIs are exclusively available through Collibra workflows and allow you to build and interact with your governance processes.

Java API scripts run on the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as the product and can impact the overall platform performance. Avoid using workflow scripts in for heavy processes.

Collibra provides four public REST APIs that allow you to integrate with your organization’s technology. Using your favorite language, you can create, update, and retrieve data, write complex scripts, or build friendly user interfaces.

The REST APIs are documented following the OpenAPI Specification 3.0. They are language agnostic and you can use them to generate clients that interact with your data. Each API endpoint has the following characteristics:

  • Stateless: No context is stored and each client must provide all the necessary information to service the request.
  • Cacheable: The client's intermediary can cache the responses.
  • Uniform interface: All responses are provided as JSON.

Modules

  • Core API: The Core API primarily focuses on resources. You can use it to create and update resources, create integrations with your systems or develop custom applications. It is ideal for low-level CRUD operations, such as retrieving specific data for a workflow or for your external data applications and to modify metamodel and instance data. It is not recommended for importing large amounts of data.
  • Import API: Use the Import API to efficiently import, update, and synchronize large amounts of data. It supports JSON, CSV, or Excel file formats so you can upload communities, domains, assets, or complex relations and characteristics.
  • Data Catalog API: Use the Data Catalog API to connect the Collibra Data Catalog to sources that are not natively supported. You can use it to ingest information into the Data Catalog, classify data, get marketplace statistics, update column profiles and for S3 synchronization.
  • Search API: Use the Search API to create custom search queries with the Collibra platform search engine for large amounts of non-hierarchical data. Although not a full query language, you can perform full text or wildcard searches for resource components.
  • Output Module API: The Output Module, part of the Core API, is a lightweight graph query engine exposed through the public REST API. It is a powerful tool that queries data in a hierarchical manner. It allows different output formats, such as JSON, XML, Excel or CSV and is a one-stop-API to query most assets using SQL-like filtering capabilities.

API first

Collibra is an API first company. It is our guarantee to treat our APIs as first-class products so you can focus on building quality applications and integrations on top of Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud.

Additional resources

To get started with the Collibra APIs, check out these tutorials: