Data Lineage
ELI5 - The Vibe Check
Data lineage is the paper trail that answers where did this number actually come from when a dashboard shows something wrong. It traces a piece of data backward through every transformation, every job, every table it passed through, from the raw source all the way to the chart your boss is currently panicking about.
Real Talk
Data lineage is the tracked history of data as it moves and transforms through a pipeline, recording its origin, the transformations applied, and every downstream table or report it feeds. Lineage tools, like OpenLineage, a dbt project's dependency graph, or a catalog's built-in tracking, make it possible to trace a broken metric back to its root cause and assess the blast radius of a schema change before making it.
When You'll Hear This
"Check the lineage graph before you drop that column, three dashboards depend on it." / "We added lineage tracking after a silent upstream change broke half our reports."
Related Terms
Data Contract
It's like a pinky promise between two teams, but legally binding (well, technically binding). Team A says 'I promise this data will always have these colum
Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is where all your company's data goes to be analyzed.
ETL
ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load. You extract data from sources, transform it (clean, reshape, calculate), then load it into your warehouse.
Schema Evolution
Your data's shape never actually stays still: new fields show up, old ones get renamed, types change, and yet you've got old data sitting around in the old...