Collecting and visualizing data lineage of Spark jobs

• Published in: Datenbank-Spektrum : Zeitschrift für Datenbanktechnologie : Organ der Fachgruppe Datenbanken der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V Vol. 21; no. 3; pp. 179 - 189
• Main Authors: Schoenenwald Alexander, Kern, Simon, Viehhauser Josef, Schildgen Johannes
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Springer Nature B.V 01.01.2021
• Subjects: Applications programs; Automobiles; Data collection; Data management; Metadata; Pipelines
• ISSN: 1618-2162; 1610-1995
• DOI: 10.1007/s13222-021-00387-7

Metadata management constitutes a key prerequisite for enterprises as they engage in data analytics and governance. Today, however, the context of data is often only manually documented by subject matter experts, and lacks completeness and reliability due to the complex nature of data pipelines. Thus, collecting data lineage—describing the origin, structure, and dependencies of data—in an automated fashion increases quality of provided metadata and reduces manual effort, making it critical for the development and operation of data pipelines. In our practice report, we propose an end-to-end solution that digests lineage via (Py‑)Spark execution plans. We build upon the open-source component Spline, allowing us to reliably consume lineage metadata and identify interdependencies. We map the digested data into an expandable data model, enabling us to extract graph structures for both coarse- and fine-grained data lineage. Lastly, our solution visualizes the extracted data lineage via a modern web app, and integrates with BMW Group’s soon-to-be open-sourced Cloud Data Hub.