Why You Should Implement Data Lineage
Introduction
Many business operators struggle to understand what happened with their big data when something goes wrong with it. Data lineage in your application makes this situation much simpler by giving you a flowchart of the channels your data follows, enabling you to track the changes occurring during processing, transformation, and transmission. Using this knowledge, you will be able to govern your data properly, allowing you to deliver real-time information and reports to your customers.
In this blog, I will show you how Bold BI helps organizations implement data lineage and track their data to provide clear and accurate reports to their customers:
- Definition of data lineage
- Why do you need data lineage?
- Other benefits of data lineage
- Bold BI and data lineage
Definition of data lineage
Organizations collect data from all kinds of sources and format it for different purposes. Keeping track of data lineage via metadata gives them a record the source of their data and its transformations. Data lineage helps monitor and visualize the flow of data from its sources to clients to ensure that end-users receive quality information that meets their needs.
Why do you need data lineage?
Data lineage helps data managers with the end-to-end traceability of data movement. This helps them to solve many problems that may occur with its usage. The following are some of the reasons why you need to track data lineage in your organization:
- To track errors in data processes
- To improve the quality of data
- To facilitate data management
- Increases transparency in organizational data
To track errors in data processes
When errors occur in analysis outputs, when the data from one department doesn’t match another’s, when results just look wonky, you can use data lineage to figure out where things went wrong. You can track the data used for those results from their common source all the way through the many transformations it underwent to be useful. You can determine at what point the data was improperly changed, by whom, and perhaps note a process that needs to be adjusted to prevent future errors. All of this is much faster with data lineage information.
To improve the quality of data
Keeping track of data lineage gives you an easy means to check the quality of your data and improve it if needed. Data goes through many changes as it’s manipulated and used and can become hard to match to its source, such as if labels change. For routine quality checks or if something doesn’t look right, it’s easy to trace the data back to its correct origin through a tracked lineage to make sure errors have not been introduced.
To facilitate data management
Data lineage information enables users to identify outdated and relevant data sources. They can clean up their databases and choose pertinent sources of data to continue using in their analyses. Deleting or archiving irrelevant information kept in the company databases is good data management.
Increases transparency in organizational data
Since data lineage shows you the origin of data, records how it was transformed and moved over time, and visualizes its flow from data sources to end-users, you will have the lifecycle of your data at your fingertips. This lets you quickly verify the results of your data manipulation, spot and correct errors, and regulate end users’ data.
Other benefits of data lineage
Data lineage information helps companies ensure the data they’re using is accurate and shows them how often it’s used. To practice data analysis with confidence, they need to be able to trace the data from its sources to where it is being transferred and what happens to it in between. The following are the benefits of implementing data lineage:
- Better data governance
- Better risk mitigation
- Accurate decision-making
Better data governance
Adhering to the high standards of security most companies promise for their and their customers’ data becomes exceptionally difficult after it’s been transformed so often as to become unrecognizable beside its source. How can you prove that the data you have been using was obtained, processed, and stored properly? Data lineage information eliminates this problem, which can be especially important in cases of auditing.
Better risk mitigation
When a company is switching its technology to a whole new software system, or even just moving its data to a different storage, things can go wrong. The team responsible for the switch can use data lineage information to understand where the data is and what kind of impact moving that data might have. They can also spot data sources that are no longer relevant and clean them out before energy is put into moving them. Migration is quicker and less risky this way.
Accurate decision-making
Data lineage improves your ability to understand your company’s data and its entire journey to your reports. Making data-driven decisions is the way forward for companies, but if that data is wrong, so are the decisions made with it. Your data team can much better ensure the accuracy of the data your company depends on when it can easily find where it came from and see how it’s changed.
Bold BI and data lineage
Bold BI is the integration of analytical and data visualization capabilities in the form of dashboards into your software application without any hassle. With Bold BI, the end-user can quickly find their data’s lineage to get all the source information they are looking for.
Features of Bold BI
Data visualization
Bold BI allows widgets to be easily combined in an intuitive way. It allows a visualization interface to be created with the help of a customization system, offering a better user experience for representing data. This help managers easily put together information from their data in a clear view.
Deployment
With Bold BI, choose the deployment environment that best suits your needs. Bold BI is cloud-neutral or can be deployed on your company servers. Such deployment is always self-contained and does not require any connection to other environments outside your control. Install directly in a Windows or Linux server, run as a local Docker image, or deploy on Azure App Service or Kubernetes.
Extensibility
Bold BI is customizable and extensible, with a variety of features that are suited for embedding. It has a mobile app and supports authentication protocols, multi-development languages, themes, and more.
Data connectivity
Bold BI business analysts can connect to all types of business data from files and databases to web services. This makes it possible for team members to easily access data from Excel files and common relational datastores such as SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL.
Security
Bold BI gives users granular control over access permissions and data security at rest or in transit. You can host the entire product, including all data, within your private data center or your public cloud accounts with absolutely no access provided to anyone else, including Syncfusion.
Data preparation
Bold BI offers data preparation features that make your job easier. Connect to a vast array of data sources and directly to any data store. Visually perform actions such as joins and filters and add calculated fields at the data source level. The Syncfusion Data Integration platform helps with advanced preparation needs.
Conclusion
Now that you know the benefits of tracking data lineage, I encourage you to implement it in your business for smoother data management.
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, React with ASP.NET Core, and more, seamlessly. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features.
You can create any kind of dashboard you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on September 7, 2022.
