Data Lineage
Tracking data from its origin through every transformation and system it passes through. Answers 'where did this number come from?' for audits and debugging.
What is Data Lineage?
Tracking data from its origin through every transformation and system it passes through. Answers 'where did this number come from?' for audits and debugging.
Data Lineage is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Data Governance & Compliance area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Data Lineage" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Data Catalog
A searchable inventory of all datasets in an organization, with metadata like schema, owner, freshness, and lineage. The 'Google for your data.'
ETL
Extract, Transform, Load: a pipeline that extracts data from sources, transforms it into the desired format, and loads it into a destination like a data warehouse.
Data Lake
A centralized repository that stores raw data at any scale in its native format. Unlike a data warehouse, data doesn't need to be structured or cleaned before loading.