How Can You Track And Visualize Data Lineage?

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The current success of modern organizations depends a lot on data, the so-called data-driven companies. The ability to analyze information and get valuable insights from it to help in decision-making is what makes businesses grow, win market share over their competitors and improve productivity.

But to make this happen, data quality, usability and security should be the top priorities of the business, or nothing will be accomplished with that data. And that’s where data lineage comes in and becomes such an important process for any data-driven organization.

Data lineage is about tracking the flow of information to guarantee the quality, accuracy, usability and security of data being handled by your company. The process can be defined as the data life cycle, in which its entire movement across the data flow gets tracked from the source to the final destination to see how and where it changed.

When talking about large organizations, data lineage will not only track the data changes from its origin to the destination, but it’ll also give full reports on databases and complex data flows from one file to another, in a way that it’s possible to track changes in the data in specific points as it goes through transformational processes – a challenging task, but that can be accomplished with data lineage.

Understanding, recording and visualizing data as it advances through the data flow is what ensures quality and accuracy, and when issues happen, data lineage gives your company the power to see exactly where and how it happened, so you can fix it at the root.

It also allows your company to:

Track errors
Ensure data governance
Implement new processes or change the current ones with lower risks of compromising the data
Perform system migrations

But tracking and visualizing data lineage requires good tools and great partnerships with suppliers that understand how your company works and what use you give to your data.

Choosing the Best Data Lineage Tools

As mentioned above, data lineage is an important process for data-driven companies, and it’s through it that you’ll be able to ensure data quality, accuracy and security by visualizing and managing the entire journey of your data. And choosing the best data lineage tool is the first step in order to make this happen.

There are a few features in those tools that will guarantee a great fit for your process:

1. Check if the tool has the full ability to trace and verify the entire data history. The only way to see if the data that left the source and arrived at the destination kept its high quality is by looking at the entire history of its changes.

2. The tool must offer the option of immutability, in a way that you can get back to older versions of the dataset before changes were made.

3. If your company is already dealing with several data tools, the data lineage one should be able to integrate with them or any other third-party application. This way, all the stages and tools involved in the data flow will be integrated.

4. Data changes, improves, increases, decreases and is always on movement. The tool must keep track of all different versions of the data and change its models according to it.

Your company probably has several teams looking at the same data and taking insights from the same datasets, so being able to keep this collaboration in data lineage must be a priority. Ensure that the tool will show who made changes in the data and why those changes were made.

The Emissary Data Lineage Solution

The Emissary solution for data lineage offers a complete software with evergreen data lineage with no-code, machine learning-enabled interface and reconciliation development. You’ll easily manage your data and integrate it with any other tools and applications already used within your organization.

You’ll be able to:

Know exactly how data is flowing inside your organization
See the entire data lineage in one single unified view with the help of complete graphics
Pull information faster for auditors
Trace specific data values and changes that happened at specific times

You’ll easily manage your data and integrate it with any other tools and applications already used within your organization.