Why it matters
A column rename in silver can break a gold table, a Power BI report and a model three teams away. Most of those dependencies are not written down anywhere the person making the change can see. LakeLogic draws them from your contracts and your BI scans, so you can check before you ship.
What you can do
- Trace any table upstream to its sources and downstream to its consumers.
- See which reports, dashboards and models depend on your data.
- See where personal (PII) and other sensitive data flows across the estate.
- Check the downstream reach of an erasure request.
- Run impact analysis on a contract change while you edit it.
How to do it in LakeLogic
- Go to Understand → Lineage. The page is the Lineage Explorer.
- Choose a view: Graph (tables by layer, bronze to gold), Mappings, or Estate flow (domains, the systems in them, and how they depend on each other and feed consumers).
- Click a node. The panel lists its Upstream Sources and Downstream Consumers.
- Select Trace Downstream Impact or Analyze Upstream Flow for the full chain.
- For a table with PII fields, select Analyze Erasure Impact to list every downstream asset that receives it. You can print this as a report.
- Turn on the PII or sensitive-data overlay to highlight where that data travels.
- If the graph looks out of date, select Refresh lineage to rebuild it from your current contracts.
For BI consumers, two pages sit under Lineage:
- Consumers: review declared and discovered data consumers.
- Scan & sync: run the BI scan that finds reports and models that depend on your data.
Where lineage comes from
| Source | How it is labelled | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A contract | Declared in a contract | Someone stated the dependency in the contract. |
| A scan | Observed by a scan | A BI or platform scan found the dependency. |
In Estate flow, declared links are dashed and observed links are solid, and each consumer carries a Declared or Observed badge. A table a contract links to, with no contract of its own, is shown as an unresolved upstream.
What you get
- The upstream and downstream chain for any table, from source to consumer.
- A list of assets affected by erasing a person's data, ready to print.
- A printable lineage report, from Export.
Good to know
- Lineage is only as complete as what LakeLogic has read. A dependency that no contract states and no scan observed does not appear. Absent is not proof of no dependency.
- In the contract editor, Impact analysis runs the same check for the change you are making. See Write a data contract your pipelines enforce.
- BI scans need a BI tool connected in Integrations. See Integrations.
- AI assistants connected over MCP can ask for the same downstream view. See Connect your AI assistant.