Enable Lineage

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Core Connector Core connectors are included with all Alation platform tiers (subject to each tier’s connector limits) and are fully supported by Alation.

Lineage is data about the origin of data and its movement through an organization’s data ecosystem. Lineage documents how target data objects are created from source data objects. To learn more about viewing lineage in the Alation catalog, see Discover Lineage.

SAP HANA data sources support table-level and column-level lineage. Table-level lineage is generated during metadata extraction and query log ingestion by default. Column-level lineage is an additional feature that requires the SAP HANA column-level lineage parser add-on. Contact Alation about purchasing this add-on.

Note

Alation expects that queries ingested during metadata extraction and query log ingestion use fully qualified object names. Ingesting queries with partially qualified object names may result in incomplete lineage information.

The parsing of queries that include outer joins using the plus (+) operator is supported.

Enable Column-Level Lineage

Important

Applies from Alation version 2024.1.5 or newer

To enable column-level lineage:

  1. Log in to your Alation instance as a Server Admin.

  2. Click the Admin Settings icon gear on top right to open the Admin Settings page.

  3. Under Server Admin, click Feature Configuration to open the feature configuration page.

  4. Activate the toggle Automatically extracts Column Level Lineage for SAP HANA data sources.

  5. Click the Save changes button.

    ../../../_images/SAP_HANA_Feature_Config.png

  6. In the Verify Feature Configuration Change dialog, click the Save Configuration button.

    ../../../_images/SAP_HANA_Feature_Config_Confirm.png

View Column-Level Lineage

With the column-level lineage add-on enabled, Alation will automatically generate column-level lineage data based on the existing metadata that was previously extracted with MDE, QLI, or ingested from Compose.

Note

Once the feature flag is enabled, the column-level lineage will be automatically generated only for the view definitions that are complete and already added to table-level lineage.

Complete view definition:

CREATE VIEW adbc_database_01.query_execution_main.table_view AS
  SELECT src.*
  FROM (SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM tpch.sf1.customer LIMIT 10) src;

Incomplete view definition:

SELECT src.*
FROM (SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM tpch.sf1.customer LIMIT 10) src;

More column-level lineage data will be created after you perform metadata extraction (MDE), query log ingestion (QLI), and (or) use Compose to run queries that create or update column objects.

To view column-level lineage data, see Trace Column Lineage.

Note

If the column-level lineage feature flag is disabled, the column-level lineage links that were generated previously are not removed. Only the future queries and query history will not be processed.

Cross-System Lineage for SDA Virtual Tables

Important

Applies from connector version 1.3.0 or newer

SAP HANA Smart Data Access (SDA) virtual tables reference objects on remote SAP HANA systems. The connector can resolve lineage edges from local virtual tables to their corresponding remote objects, providing visibility into cross-system data flows.

Enable Cross-System Lineage

To enable cross-system lineage resolution:

  1. On the General Settings tab of the data source Settings page, under Connector Settings, enable the Enable cross-system Lineage toggle.

  2. Click Save.

  3. Ensure the service account has the SELECT permission on the following system views:

    • SYS.VIRTUAL_TABLES

    • SYS.REMOTE_SOURCES

    • _SYS_REPO.ACTIVE_OBJECT

  4. Run metadata extraction. The direct lineage job will run automatically after MDE completes.

How Cross-System Lineage Works

When enabled, the connector performs the following during the direct lineage extraction phase:

  1. Queries PUBLIC.OBJECT_DEPENDENCIES to retrieve local object dependencies (table-to-view, view-to-view relationships).

  2. Queries SYS.VIRTUAL_TABLES joined with SYS.REMOTE_SOURCES to identify virtual tables connected to remote SAP HANA systems via the hanaodbc adapter.

  3. Parses the CONNECTION_INFO field from remote sources to extract the remote host and port.

  4. Parses CSDATA XML from _SYS_REPO.ACTIVE_OBJECT to resolve data source references in calculation views.

  5. Resolves remote object names to fully qualified references (schema.table) on the remote data source.

Lineage edges are streamed back to Alation and displayed as cross-system connections between the local SAP HANA data source and the remote SAP HANA data source cataloged in Alation.

Note

  • Cross-system lineage resolution is limited to remote SAP HANA systems connected via the hanaodbc adapter. Other adapter types are not supported.

  • When this setting is disabled (default), the connector behaves identically to version 1.2.2.

  • Virtual tables are only included in metadata extraction when this setting is enabled.