Lineage Diagrams

When it comes to making important business decisions, filing financial records, or complying with all manner of regulations, organizations need verifiable data. Public corporations in the United States must be able to prove to the IRS or to the SEC that values supplied in balance sheets and income statements are legitimate, for example. In pharmaceuticals research, data collected over multi-year clinical trials that may be combined with anonymous patient statistics must be able to be traced to data sources.

Cloudera Navigator lineage diagrams are designed to enable this type of verification. Lineage diagrams can reveal the provenance of data entities—the history of the data entity, back to its source with all changes along the way to its present form.

A lineage diagram is a directed graph that shows how data entities are related and how an entity may have changed over its lifetime in the cluster. Cloudera Navigator uses the metadata associated with entities contained in the cluster to render lineage diagrams that can trace data sources back to the column level and show relations and the results of transformations. See Lineage Diagram Icons for details about the line colors, styles, and icons used to render lineage diagrams, some of which are explained in the context of the examples below.