Data lineage: What is it and how to implement it

Data lineage is the process of tracking the movement, transformation, and relationships of data as it flows through different systems. It helps data teams manage incidents, guide migrations, maintain compliance for better data governance, and optimize their data flow by reducing inefficiencies or redundancies throughout their data infrastructure. There are two main types of data lineage: table-level and column-level. Automating data lineage offers several key benefits such as minimizing human errors, making troubleshooting faster, and enhancing compliance with audit trails that are automatically generated and updated. Implementing data lineage involves identifying the business use case for it, automating as much as possible, ensuring the format matches the use case, and focusing on one use case first before addressing others.