Dependency Management: Impact Assessment and Migrations

You want to understand the downstream impact of a change you are planning to make
There is a data issue with the numbers you see on a dashboard and you are trying to understand the source of it
You identified a bug in one of the tables and you would like to identify which reports and users are affected

All of these questions and more can be answered by Catalog's full data warehouse (DWH) lineage, for your dashboards, tables, and fields or columns.

Lineage

By navigating to the Lineage tab you can quickly identify the sources of a dashboard, table, or fields or columns and its immediate parents and children.

You can also navigate further using the lineage graph or export a downstream node report to get all the given asset dependencies.

Column Lineage also provides end-to-end dependency information between fields and columns. It can help you answer questions like:

What is the source of a field?
Where is this field generated?
What is the impact if you change a column?

Extract all downstream nodes is an extremely helpful report that provides info about all downstream children of an asset or a column:

Node (where to find)
Source (database technology, BI tool)
Depth (how far from the parent)
Type (table, view, dashboard, etc.)
Parent (immediate parent)
Popularity (calculated based on consumption queries)
Owners (useful if they have to be notified)
Frequent Users (as above)

Catalog can provide other reports that might be useful for specific use cases (for example, migrations, environment mergers). Please contact your Catalog team for more details.

Find out more about lineage in Catalog in the Lineage section.

Lineage​

Lineage