Utilizing Snowflake Data Lineage to Its Fullest: Tips & Tricks
- Ndz Anthony
- December 20, 2022
Historically, Data lineage was used to understand the data journey through a data processing system, from its initial source to a destination.
According to Wikipedia, Data lineage includes the data origin, what happens to it, and where it moves over time. It gives visibility while greatly simplifying the ability to trace errors back to the root cause in a data analytics process.
How Did Data Lineage Become Well-known?
Data lineage gained popularity due to several reasons, such as:
First, More Data
Businesses now have more data and require more robust metadata management tools.
Next, More Innovative advancements within the Data Industry
New development paradigms were created to support the growing complexities of modern businesses today.
The rise of concepts such as cloud Data Ops and Data meshing emphasize the need to govern and track the lineage of your data assets optimally, hence the need for data lineage & data lineage tools.
How Exactly Does Data Lineage Help?
Let’s review four ways implementing data lineage can aid an organization:
- Cost-effectiveness: Most cloud data warehouses nowadays run on consumption-based pricing models. Traditionally data teams would have to run tons of queries to investigate the history of impacted data assets. Modern data lineage tools can quickly and graphically discover and profile data assets, reducing time and costs.
- Guarantees Optimal Data Pipelines: Data lineage automation allows one to inspect the entire length of a data pipeline, from source to target.
- Simplifying Root Cause Analysis and Tracking: When inconsistencies are discovered within data pipelines or processes, data teams are tasked with identifying the problem and in some cases, providing a root cause analysis. With Data lineage tools, this can be achieved in a few steps.
What’s with Snowflake Data Lineage?
Snowflake is a fully managed SaaS (software as a service) that provides a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure sharing and consumption of real-time / shared data. It scales automatically in both directions to achieve the ideal performance/cost ratio.
Whilst using Snowflake DWs, it can be stressful to manually assess data integrity, guarantee quality and uncompromised security, and carry out impact analyses.
Automating data lineage to monitor your data assets moving to Snowflake can significantly help migrate data.
Hence, we’ve chosen to assist you in addressing the following two key questions:
- Why add data lineage as a supplement to Snowflake?
- Top Data Lineage Tools For Snowflake
Why Add Data Lineage as a Supplement to Snowflake?
Businesses that automate metadata management and lineage mapping see an improvement in several areas, including:
Increased Data Confidence
To ensure that teams are confident acting on the findings of specific data analytics, teams can use automated lineage data to retrace the data lineage and confirm the precision and integrity of data in reporting or analytics while citing the supporting documentation.
Technology that strengthens data trust and reliability, in addition to people and processes, aids in preserving sound data governance in the cloud.
In addition to establishing documentation and protocols for what information to gather and how to format metadata and data models for the assets collected, lineage can support governance in several other areas.
Before outliers trickle down and have an impact further down the line, Data lineage makes it simpler to identify them and correct data attributes.
Flexible Data Workflows
Lineage provides data teams with a thorough overview of all data flows, simplifying identifying and locating data assets, increasing workflow productivity, and decreasing the time spent looking for, confirming, and requesting permissions to access data.
Capability to Achieve and Maintain Regulatory Compliance
Automating lineage visually represents how data moves through different systems from source to destination.
How PII (personally identifiable information) is protected, encrypted, and masked, and where it is stored in the system.
TOP 10 Snowflake Data Lineage Tools
Immuta
Immuta is the industry pioneer in secure data access, giving data teams a single, all-inclusive platform to manage access to cloud-based analytical data sets. Immuta’s expanding network of top cloud data platform partners includes Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, and Starburst. Snowflake has recently accepted Immuta as the first Snowflake Ready Technology Validation Partner in the “Data Security” partner category. The performance, dependability, and security of Immuta’s Snowflake integration have been confirmed to follow the platform’s best practices.
OvalEdge
OvalEdge is a data catalog and governance tool that effectively consolidates a company’s data into a single repository or catalog. OvalEdge offers a forward-thinking approach to data governance.
With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, OvalEdge and Snowflake are in a perfect position to mobilize all of the world’s data and assist joint customers in maximizing opportunities for data-driven decision-making.
Atlan
With Atlan, modern data teams can easily find, comprehend, trust, and work together on data assets. Atlan is an active metadata platform.
The data cloud company Snowflake and Atlan, the hub for modern data teams, have recently announced a close partnership.
Snowflake’s platform’s speed, scalability, and affordability are advantageous to Atlan’s customers. Snowflake allows businesses to produce more reliable analytics more quickly and easily.
Alation
Alation is best suited for helping data analysts and scientists understand the business by curating metadata. It offers a platform for users to run queries and share them with others, resulting in a collaborative environment.
Alation streamlines data classification by ingesting, applying, updating, and synchronizing Snowflake Object Tags. Snowflake data that has been tagged makes it simpler to locate, safeguard, and apply governance policies.
DataEdo
Dataedo is a powerful database management tool. It allows you to track database changes, group changes by the developer, and much more.
You can manage and centralize your data using Dataedo. Its dynamic fields are optimally designed, keeping your network’s metadata in one location.
Datameer
For investigating, putting together, visualizing, and cataloging Snowflake insights, Datameer is the all-in-one solution. Your new go-to resource for data inquiries.
Through a seamless analytics workflow and a combination of automatically generated and user-generated data documentation, Datameer and Snowflake can help joint customers mobilize global data.
Castor
Castor is an automated, collaborative tool for data discovery. Giving a summary of all the data an organization uses facilitates data discovery and unifies search across the entire data ecosystem.
Weld
The Weld app allows users to materialize models as tables, incremental tables, views, or custom materializations. Weld is the quickest method for combining data from your tools to produce original business insights.
Coalesce
Coalesce makes it simple to navigate your data pipeline. Each screen and button provides quick access to everything you require. Your data team has more control over each project, from comparing code side by side to seeing project and audit history in real time.
Lineage at the table and column levels is provided automatically and constantly updated.
Axon Data Governance
Axon Data Governance from Informatica is the collaboration hub and data marketplace for effective, scalable data governance programs. A carefully curated data marketplace guarantees that teams can quickly locate, access, and comprehend the data required to generate analytics insights.
Organizations can be sure they’re using reliable data thanks to the integration of Axon Data Governance and Snowflake.
Datameer, Your Snowflake Data Lineage Solution
In Datameer, complete data lineage is captured all the way down to every transformation. This helps to understand where your data came from, how it was shaped, and where it went.
Learn more about our innovative data transformation solution.
Choose Datameer today!
