Data lineage is a visual representation of the flow of data across the systems in your organization. Lineage shows how the data flows from the system of origin to the system of destination.
You can view data lineage for technical and business assets that are available in Data Governance and Catalog. You can use lineage to gather various types of information about your data, including the following information:
•Data flow across data containers, databases, and tables that use data elements
•Where and how data is used in a particular system
•Dependencies of the data
•Processes that the data undergoes
Business Use
You can use lineage in Data Governance and Catalog for various cataloging and governance purposes, including the following purposes:
•Understand the systems that access the data and the scale of its use.
•Know the upstream factors that contribute to the data, and the downstream systems that make use of the data. If you create a business report that uses the data, you can know the upstream data sets from where the data is derived. Similarly, if you choose to modify the data, you can know the downstream data sets that can be affected by the change.
•See quality improvements to the data along the way and identify distortions or discrepancies.
•View changes to data, such as standardization of formats.
•Understand the security and privacy processes that apply to the data, such as data sensitivity. You can determine if privacy policies have been applied at the right stage of the data flow according to the governance principles of your organization.