Summary
Data lineage is the roadmap for your data platform, providing visibility into all of the dependencies for any report, machine learning model, or data warehouse table that you are working with. Because of its centrality to your data systems it is valuable for debugging, governance, understanding context, and myriad other purposes. This means that it is important to have an accurate and complete lineage graph so that you don’t have to perform your own detective work when time is in short supply. In this episode Ernie Ostic shares the approach that he and his team at Manta are taking to build a complete view of data lineage across the various data systems in your organization and the useful applications of that information in the work of every data stakeholder.
Have you ever woken up to a crisis because a number on a dashboard is broken and no one knows why? Or sent out frustrating slack messages trying to find the right data set? Or tried to understand what a column name means?
Our friends at Atlan started out as a data team themselves and faced all this collaboration chaos themselves, and started building Atlan as an internal tool for themselves. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more.
Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription.
Your data platform needs to be scalable, fault tolerant, and performant, which means that you need the same from your cloud provider. Linode has been powering production systems for over 17 years, and now they’ve launched a fully managed Kubernetes platform. With the combined power of the Kubernetes engine for flexible and scalable deployments, and features like dedicated CPU instances, GPU instances, and object storage you’ve got everything you need to build a bulletproof data pipeline. If you go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today you’ll even get a $100 credit to use on building your own cluster, or object storage, or reliable backups, or… And while you’re there don’t forget to thank them for being a long-time supporter of the Data Engineering Podcast!
Bigeye is an industry-leading data observability platform that gives data engineering and science teams the tools they need to ensure their data is always fresh, accurate and reliable. Companies like Instacart, Clubhouse, and Udacity use Bigeye’s automated data quality monitoring, ML-powered anomaly detection, and granular root cause analysis to proactively detect and resolve issues before they impact the business.
Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today and start trusting your data.
Prefect is the modern Dataflow Automation platform for the modern data stack, empowering data practitioners to build, run and monitor robust pipelines at scale. Guided by the principle that the orchestrator shouldn’t get in your way, Prefect is the only tool of its kind to offer the flexibility to write code as workflows. Prefect specializes in glueing together the disparate pieces of a pipeline, and integrating with modern distributed compute libraries to bring power where you need it, when you need it.
Trusted by thousands of organizations and supported by over 20,000 community members, Prefect powers over 100MM business critical tasks a month. For more information on Prefect, visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
- When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
- Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos.
- The only thing worse than having bad data is not knowing that you have it. With Bigeye’s data observability platform, if there is an issue with your data or data pipelines you’ll know right away and can get it fixed before the business is impacted. Bigeye let’s data teams measure, improve, and communicate the quality of your data to company stakeholders. With complete API access, a user-friendly interface, and automated yet flexible alerting, you’ve got everything you need to establish and maintain trust in your data. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today to sign up and start trusting your analyses.
- Prefect is the modern Dataflow Automation platform for the modern data stack, empowering data practitioners to build, run and monitor robust pipelines at scale. Guided by the principle that the orchestrator shouldn’t get in your way, Prefect is the only tool of its kind to offer the flexibility to write code as workflows. Prefect specializes in glueing together the disparate pieces of a pipeline, and integrating with modern distributed compute libraries to bring power where you need it, when you need it. Trusted by thousands of organizations and supported by over 20,000 community members, Prefect powers over 100MM business critical tasks a month. For more information on Prefect, visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect.
- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ernie Ostic about Manta, an automated data lineage service for managing visibility and quality of your data workflows
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- Can you describe what Manta is and the story behind it?
- What are the core problems that Manta aims to solve?
- Data lineage and metadata systems are a hot topic right now. What is your summary of the state of the market?
- What are the capabilities that would lead a team or organization to choose Manta in place of the other options?
- What are some examples of "data lineage done wrong"? (what does that look like?)
- What are the risks associated with investing in an incomplete solution for data lineage?
- What are the core attributes that need to be tracked consistently to enable a comprehensive view of lineage?
- How do the practices for collecting lineage and metadata differ between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data assets and their movement?
- Can you describe how Manta is implemented?
- How have the design and goals of the product changed or evolved?
- What is involved in integrating Manta with an organization’s data systems?
- What are the biggest sources of friction/errors in collecting and cleaning lineage information?
- One of the interesting capabilities that you advertise is versioning and time travel for lineage information. Why is that a necessary and useful feature?
- Once an organization’s lineage information is available in Manta, how does it factor into the daily workflow of different roles/stakeholders?
- There are a variety of use cases for metadata in a data platform beyond lineage. What are the benefits that you see from focusing on that as a core competency?
- Beyond validating quality, identifying errors, etc. it seems that automated discovery of lineage could produce insights into when the presence of data assets that shouldn’t exist. What are some examples of similar discoveries that you are aware of?
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Manta used?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Manta?
- When is Manta the wrong choice?
- What do you have planned for the future of Manta?
Contact Info
- @dsrealtime01 on Twitter
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
- Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.
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Links
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
