Data lineage
Data lineage is the mapping of how data flows from the source through its extraction, transformation, and loading into its end destination.
What is data lineage?
When you’re working with data, it’s important to keep things clear and organized, especially if you have a data team with several people and/or tools. Data lineage is a way of mapping the journey of your data through your data operations process or cycle. It plays a key role in maintaining an overview of how data is processed, aggregated, transformed, cleansed, and used.
More tangibly, data lineage takes shape as a visual representation of your data’s path. From data integration (ELT), through data modelling and activation (reverse-etl, reporting, data visualization, etc.), you have a clear view of how your data moves from source to destination. From this, you can get a better understanding of what data is going where, when, why, and how.
3 benefits of data lineage
- Keeping your code clean: When you have a clear visual of your data pipelines and models, it’s easier to keep your code standardized and avoid repetitions or circular code.
- Maintaining data governance: Data lineage graphs help you keep track of how your data flows and when it’s being transformed, processed, and verified. You can use your data lineage to help establish and track your data governance and security processes.
- Spotting and resolving data errors: Especially as your data operations scale and your models and metrics start to multiply, data lineage is an important way to spot errors early and manage them quickly.
Maintaining your data lineage with Weld
Many modern data teams use tooling to support their data lineage efforts, and this has become a crucial piece of the modern data stack. With Weld, a data operations platform, lineage is a part of the whole package. Rather than add yet another software to your ever-growing data operations toolbox, lineage is built into Weld’s data modelling tool.
The broader feature set of Weld includes dozens of pre-built ELT and reverse-ETL pipelines and integrations with all the major data warehouses. Weld’s data modelling tool is ideal for building, storing, and maintaining your models in a single space with smart autocomplete, error highlighting, audit logs, version control, and — you guessed it — lineage and observability.
Curious to learn more about how Weld can power your data operations? Book a call with one of our data specialists.
