Company
Date Published
May 15, 2023
Author
Kevin Hu, PhD
Word count
5125
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Data lineage is the process of tracking data through its life cycle across various transformations, and it plays a crucial role in managing and understanding your data landscape. It provides visibility into how data flows and transforms across systems, which is invaluable for data governance, compliance, debugging, and change impact analysis. In Snowflake, you can leverage database metadata to capture data lineage using views like `OBJECT_DEPENDENCIES`, `ACCESS_HISTORY`, and `QUERY_HISTORY`. However, raw data lineage information is most valuable when visualized and integrated into your workflows. Data lineage can help with a number of jobs-to-be-done including root cause analysis, impact analysis, reducing inefficiencies, and onboarding new members of the team or data consumers.