Data Lineage: What is it & How to Get Started?

With rapid digitalization, companies and individuals are surrounded by data. When collected, processed, and managed effectively, data helps businesses retrieve meaningful information that helps them scale.

For effective analysis, you must gather useful data silos across multiple sources. Your data should work round the clock for the betterment of your company and it’s only possible when you have the right data management practices in place. 

So, adding effective data management software into the arsenal can help you dig deeper and fetch useful insights. 

Why you Should Know the Details of Data?

You should know the details of your data – its origin, how it becomes discoverable, how it’s traveling across channels, etc. to understand its real worth. That’s when you need data lineage tools as they map the entire journey of data from origin to retrieval and beyond. 

You might be thinking about what data lineage is all about. It is a data management strategy that unearths the life cycle of data from source to destination. You can do successful lineage after the successful collection of data in a structured data catalog. For more information, visit https://dbmstools.com/categories/data-catalogs.

Why Data Lineage?

With data streams and channels growing continually, organizations need more defined data accessibility for making the right decisions through business intelligence. Understanding how data moves through ETL, reports, files, and databases can help improve products and services. 

The information that data analysts will get through source tracking will help facilitate process modifications, error resolution, faster system migration, and more. It can also help in improving the quality of data by assuring it flows through protective protocols and techniques. 

Data lineage is certainly a noteworthy place to start if you need to ensure better data quality. A fair amount of training and expertise is required to effectively sort through data assets. Having reliable data lineage tools, for example, https://dbmstools.com/categories/data-lineage-tools will help you discover in-depth information about data that you collected from multiple sources. 

Businesses often use different data lineage techniques to understand the journey of data. These techniques include:

  • Pattern-based Lineage
  • Data-tagging 
  • Self-contained lineage
  • Lineage by parsing

Apart from this, it is important to know that lineage is performed differently across stages of the data pipeline:

  • Data ingestion
  • Data processing
  • Query history
  • Data lakes

While building a data lineage system, businesses must keep track of various processes that transforms data across various stages. It is important to collect metadata at each phase, store it securely in the repository, and use it later for lineage analysis.