Lineage overview

Our lineage is built to be performant and work out of the box. This means you’ll automatically get column-level lineage from BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and ClickHouse to Looker and Tableau with the ability to explore thousands of assets with sub-second latency. The lineage is helpful for core workflows such as

• Understand the downstream impact of an issue across dbt and your BI tools to decide the urgency at which you resolve it.
• Understand the downstream implications of making a change to a column upstream.
• Debugging a data issue to find upstream dependencies.

The Synq lineage automatically extracts data from your data warehouse and BI tool several times daily to ensure you always have an automated, up-to-date lineage view.

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Understanding the downstream impact of an issue

1. Synq alerts show the number of impacted assets. Clicking on the impacted assets brings you to the lineage view in Synq with these assets pre-filtered

   

2. Use the sidebar to quickly filter down to specific assets downstream, such as a Looker dashboard.

   

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Assessing the impact of making a change

1. Navigate to the lineage for the table you’re about to change and click on the table name in the lineage to toggle Filter by column

   

2. Filtering by a column lets you see all downstream assets where the column is being used. Click X to remove the column selection or + to expand the lineage.

   

3. Click on a column in one of the downstream assets to see how the column was derived in code

   

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Upstream lineage to trace down the issue’s root cause

1. Navigate to the most downstream asset, such as a Looker dashboard you’re debugging.

   

2. To trace upstream issues, Use the left side menu bar to filter down on, e.g., quickly, dbt sources or data models with status errors.

3. Click the data asset and select Filter by column to trace where a specific column is used upstream.