Lineage as Architectural Evidence

Data lineage provides evidence about relationships between data assets, transformations and downstream dependencies.

Architecture uses

• Assess downstream impact before changing a table, column or pipeline.
• Trace upstream sources when investigating quality or reporting issues.
• Understand how technical assets support data products and consumer outputs.
• Identify gaps where important parts of a data flow are not represented.

Coverage matters

Lineage is only as complete as the metadata and connector scenarios available to Microsoft Purview. If a source, workspace or transformation is not scanned or supported, the lineage graph can be partial.

Architects should therefore treat lineage as evidence with known coverage rather than assuming every visualised graph is automatically end-to-end.