Lineage Introduction

Lineage is the record of how data moves between containers and between the fields inside them. You read it on two Lineage tabs: a container's, centered on that container, and a datastore's, which opens on a map of the datastores it exchanges data with and leads to all of its containers that have lineage. Both draw the same connections, and both offer an impact analysis of what a container feeds and what feeds it. This deep dive covers what a connection is and the rules it obeys, where connections come from, how to read the graph, field-level lineage, the datastore views and impact analysis, worked scenarios, the practices that keep a graph trustworthy, and who can change what.

A data quality issue rarely stays where it starts, and a problem in a raw table spreads to every report and system fed by it. Lineage is what turns that from an investigation across several systems into a walk along a graph: upstream to the container that introduced the problem, downstream to everything that depends on what just broke. It also answers quieter questions, like which transformation carries one column, or which stages of a pipeline live in which datastore.

Next Steps