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# Data Lineage: What is it and why is it important?

- han yu
- May 15, 2022
- Data Governance

## Data Lineage

In the era of big data, the sources of data are extremely wide, various types of data are being generated rapidly, and the data is also growing explosively. Therefore, the data lineage is becoming As a result, data lineage has become more important than ever. In this article, let’s take a closer look at what is data lineage and why data lineage is so important.

Data Lineage

### What is data lineage?

According to Wikipedia, data lineage includes where the data came from, what happened to the data, and where the data moved over time. Data lineage provides visibility while greatly simplifying the ability to trace errors back to the root cause during data analysis.

### What questions does data lineage answer?

Data lineage sheds light on the availability, ownership, security, and quality of data as it flows across your organization, which ensures you can generate trustworthy answers to:

1. What data sources should we use to develop new customer experience programs?
2. How can data scientists increase their confidence in the data needed for advanced analytics?
3. What data should we migrate to the cloud data lake and how will the migration affect which users?
4. How does data quality vary across multiple lineage hops?
5. Where do we have risks that need to be mitigated?
6. What data in my business needs to comply with industry regulations?

### Why is data lineage so important?

Data lineage is extremely important because it allows companies to track errors in data processes, implement process changes with lower risk, perform system migrations with confidence, and combine data discovery with a comprehensive view of metadata to create a data mapping framework.

### What is automated data lineage, and do you need it?

Automated data lineage automatically tracks, records, and catalogs, thereby boosting developer productivity and assuring an up-to-date map of data across an enterprise.

We need it because with automated data lineage, the journey of the data leading into these reports is clear — and where the mistake happened is clear as well.

### How does data lineage drive business value?

Data lineage lets you know what happens to the data as it is used in any number of business processes. Utilizing the history of your data in your analysis provides visibility into those processes while greatly simplifying the ability to trace errors back to the root cause.

### What is the most popular data lineage tool on the market today?

With hundreds of data lineage tools available on the market today, finding the most popular is far from easy. If you’re looking for a data lineage tool, we highly recommend trying Gudu SQLFlow. Gudu SQLFlow is a professional and easy-to-use data lineage tool. As one of the most popular data lineage management tools, Gudu SQLFlow is widely popular in the global IT industry, used by many head metadata service providers, and supports more than 20 mainstream databases.

#### Gudu SQLFlow Main Features:

- provides a visual representation of the overall flow of data;
- automated SQL data lineage analysis across Databases, ETL, Business Intelligence, Cloud and Hadoop environments by parsing SQL Script and stored procedure;
- depicts all the data movement graphically;
- supports more than 20 major databases and still growing;
- very affordable price;
- provides automation in building the lineage no matter where the SQL resides: databases, file system, Github, Bitbucket and etc.
- shows data flows in a way that is user-friendly, clear, and understandable and gets full visibility into your BI environment;
- discovers root-cause of reporting errors, and creates invaluable business confidence;
- simplifies regulatory compliance. The visualization of data lineage provides greater transparency and audit ability;
- enables impact analysis at a granular level, drill down into table, column, and query-level lineage;
- even better, Gudu SQLFlow provides a 30 days free premium account.

### What is the difference between data lineage and data tracing?

Simply put, data lineage is the documentation of the data life cycle, while data tracing is the process of evaluating that the data is following its life cycle as expected. Many data-quality projects will require data traceability to track information and ensure that its usage is proper.

### What is data lineage in ETL?

Data lineage is a visual representation of the overall flow of data. It provides a look at how data is manipulated via the ETL process. This allows organizations to assess the quality of their data before it is loaded into an analytics tool. Data lineage is primarily a visualization of the journey of different data points.

### Conclusion

Thank you for reading our article and we hope it can help you to have a better understanding of data lineage and what data lineage is important for organizations. If you want to learn more about data lineage, we would like to advise you to visit Gudu SQLFlow for more information. As a data lineage analysis tool, Gudu SQLFlow can not only analyze SQL script files, obtain data lineage, and perform visual display, but also allow users to provide data lineage in CSV format and perform visual display.

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