Table Lineage

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Alation displays the table lineage of data both ingested into and created in Alation. Click the boxes and arrows to display additional information, including the queries that created tables and how tables connect to your BI reports.

The lineage for any database in Alation is created by parsing queries, both from the query log and directly from Compose, as well as view SQL. As queries are parsed, Alation looks for CREATE, ALTER, INSERT statements and uses that information to build the table-level lineage in the graph. For Views, Alation will parse the view definition to graphically connect it back to the tables used in its creation.

If you want to import lineage data from sources Alation does not natively support, you can do this using the Alation API.