Skip to main content
Version: Next

About DataHub Lineage

Feature Availability
Self-Hosted DataHub
Managed DataHub

Data lineage is a map that shows how data flows through your organization. It details where your data originates, how it travels, and where it ultimately ends up. This can happen within a single system (like data moving between Snowflake tables) or across various platforms.

With data lineage, you can

Viewing Lineage

You can view lineage under Lineage tab or Lineage Visualization screen.

By default, The UI shows the latest version of the lineage. The time picker can be used to filter out edges within the latest version to exclude those that were last updated outside of the time window. Selecting time windows in the patch will not show you historical lineages. It will only filter the view of the latest version of the lineage.

In this example, data flows from Airflow/BigQuery to Snowflake tables, then to the Hive dataset, and ultimately to the features of Machine Learning Models.

The Lineage Tab is greyed out - why can’t I click on it?

This means you have not yet ingested lineage metadata for that entity. Please ingest lineage to proceed.

Column Level Lineage Support

Column-level lineage tracks changes and movements for each specific data column. This approach is often contrasted with table-level lineage, which specifies lineage at the table level. Below is how column-level lineage can be set with dbt and Postgres tables.

Adding Lineage

Ingestion Source

If you're using an ingestion source that supports extraction of Lineage (e.g. Table Lineage Capability), then lineage information can be extracted automatically. For detailed instructions, refer to the source documentation for the source you are using.

UI

As of v0.9.5, DataHub supports the manual editing of lineage between entities. Data experts are free to add or remove upstream and downstream lineage edges in both the Lineage Visualization screen as well as the Lineage tab on entity pages. Use this feature to supplement automatic lineage extraction or establish important entity relationships in sources that do not support automatic extraction. Editing lineage by hand is supported for Datasets, Charts, Dashboards, and Data Jobs. Please refer to our UI Guides on Lineage for more information.

Recommendation on UI-based lineage

Lineage added by hand and programmatically may conflict with one another to cause unwanted overwrites. It is strongly recommend that lineage is edited manually in cases where lineage information is not also extracted in automated fashion, e.g. by running an ingestion source.

API

If you are not using a Lineage-support ingestion source, you can programmatically emit lineage edges between entities via API. Please refer to API Guides on Lineage for more information.

Lineage Support

DataHub supports automatic table- and column-level lineage detection from BigQuery, Snowflake, dbt, Looker, PowerBI, and 20+ modern data tools. For data tools with limited native lineage tracking, DataHub's SQL Parser detects lineage with 97–99% accuracy, ensuring teams will have high quality lineage graphs across all corners of their data stack.

Types of Lineage Connections

Types of lineage connections supported in DataHub and the example codes are as follows.

Automatic Lineage Extraction Support

This is a summary of automatic lineage extraciton support in our data source. Please refer to the Important Capabilities table in the source documentation. Note that even if the source does not support automatic extraction, you can still add lineage manually using our API & SDKs.

SourceTable-Level LineageColumn-Level LineageRelated Configs
ABS Data Lake
Athena- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
BigQuery- enable_stateful_lineage_ingestion
- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
- lineage_use_sql_parser
- lineage_parse_view_ddl
- lineage_sql_parser_use_raw_names
- extract_column_lineage
- extract_lineage_from_catalog
- include_table_lineage
- upstream_lineage_in_report
Business Glossary
ClickHouse clickhouse
ClickHouse clickhouse-usage
CockroachDB- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
CSV Enricher
Databricks- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
- include_table_lineage
- include_external_lineage
- include_column_lineage
- column_lineage_column_limit
DataHub
DataHubGc
dbt dbt- incremental_lineage
- skip_sources_in_lineage
- include_column_lineage
dbt dbt-cloud- incremental_lineage
- skip_sources_in_lineage
- include_column_lineage
Delta Lake
Druid
Elasticsearch
Feast
File Based Lineage
Fivetran- include_column_lineage
Glue- emit_s3_lineage
- glue_s3_lineage_direction
- include_column_lineage
Google Cloud Storage
Grafana
Hive
Hive Metastore hive-metastore
Hive Metastore presto-on-hive
Kafka
Kafka Connect- convert_lineage_urns_to_lowercase
Looker looker- extract_column_level_lineage
Looker lookml- extract_column_level_lineage
MariaDB
Metabase
Metadata File file
Metadata File metadata-file
Microsoft SQL Server
MLflow
Mode
MongoDB
MySQL
NiFi- incremental_lineage
Okta
Oracle
Postgres- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
PowerBI powerbi- extract_lineage
- convert_lineage_urns_to_lowercase
- enable_advance_lineage_sql_construct
- extract_column_level_lineage
PowerBI powerbi-report-server
Presto
Qlik Sense
Redash
Redshift- enable_stateful_lineage_ingestion
- incremental_lineage
- s3_lineage_config
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
- use_lineage_v2
- lineage_v2_generate_queries
- include_table_lineage
- include_copy_lineage
- include_unload_lineage
- include_table_rename_lineage
- table_lineage_mode
- extract_column_level_lineage
- resolve_temp_table_in_lineage
S3 / Local Files
SageMaker
Salesforce
SAP HANA
Sigma
Slack
Snowflake- enable_stateful_lineage_ingestion
- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
- include_table_lineage
- ignore_start_time_lineage
- upstream_lineage_in_report
- include_column_lineage
SQL Queries
Superset
Tableau- extract_column_level_lineage
- lineage_overrides
- extract_lineage_from_unsupported_custom_sql_queries
- force_extraction_of_lineage_from_custom_sql_queries
Teradata- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
- include_table_lineage
Trino trino
Trino starburst-trino-usage
Vertica- incremental_lineage
- include_table_location_lineage
- include_view_lineage
- include_view_column_lineage
- include_projection_lineage

SQL Parser Lineage Extraction

If you’re using a different database system for which we don’t support column-level lineage out of the box, but you do have a database query log available, we have a SQL queries connector that generates column-level lineage and detailed table usage statistics from the query log.

If these does not suit your needs, you can use the new DataHubGraph.parse_sql_lineage() method in our SDK. (See the source code here)

For more information, refer to the Extracting Column-Level Lineage from SQL

Our Roadmap

We're actively working on expanding lineage support for new data sources. Visit our Official Roadmap for upcoming updates!

References