Skip to content
LakeBench
ProblemsCommunityPricing
Sign inStart practicing
Back
  1. Home
  2. Interview prep
  3. What is data lineage?

Data quality · Quality Foundations

What is data lineage?

Mediumquality-07
lineagedependenciesblast radiusincident

Question

What is data lineage, and why does it matter for quality incidents?

Solution

Data lineage is the map of how data moves and transforms: which sources feed which tables, which models depend on which, and which dashboards or jobs consume the result.

Think "who is upstream and who is downstream?"

stripe.charges
      -> stg_stripe_charges
          -> fct_payments
              -> revenue_dashboard
              -> finance_close_report

Why quality teams need it

When revenue_dashboard looks wrong: 1. Lineage shows blast radius (what else broke). 2. You walk upstream to find the first bad hop (source vs transform vs join). 3. You know whom to page (producer owner vs mart owner).

Types people mention

  • Table / column lineage: field-level where possible
  • Pipeline lineage: Airflow/dbt run graph
  • Business lineage: which KPI uses which mart

How you get it

dbt docs/manifest, OpenLineage, catalog tools, warehouse query logs, manual architecture diagrams (fragile alone).

Interview tip: Define lineage as dependency graph for data. Tie it to incident triage: detect → follow lineage upstream → fix → backfill dependents.

PreviousNext