🎉 What’s new

As a data steward, you'll want governance coverage for nested fields because it helps you enforce PII and compliance policies across all your data not just top-level columns.

Until now, Atlan only synced tags for top-level (Level 1) BigQuery columns. While nested columns were visible, their Policy/IAM tags were not  leaving governance incomplete.

With this update, Atlan now supports tag ingestion, propagation, and policy enforcement for nested BigQuery columns (Level > 1) with support for nested structures up to 15 levels deep.

✨ Let’s dig deeper

Here’s what this means in practice:

• Tags applied in BigQuery (Policy/IAM) are now ingested for nested fields

• Nested columns can now be used in:

  • Tag propagation workflows
  • Policy creation → Select assets
• Governance workflows now treat nested fields as first-class assets

• You can identify sensitive data in structures like:

  • user.address.zipcode
  • event.payload.device.id

This eliminates gaps where sensitive data was previously hidden in nested JSON and ensures governance rules apply consistently across all levels.

👏 Give it a shot

• Go to Governance → Policies
• Create or edit a policy
• In Select assets, include nested columns from BigQuery
• Use tag propagation to automatically extend governance to nested fields

Make sure:

• Your BigQuery connector is active
• You have appropriate governance permissions

📘Refer to the BigQuery set up guide for nested tags.