Practical Lineage Tracing in Data Warehouses

Abstract

We consider the view data lineage problem in a warehousing environment: For a given data item in a materialized warehouse view, we want to identify the set of source data items that produced the view item. We formalize the problem, and we present a lineage tracing algorithm for relational views with aggregation. Based on our tracing algorithm, we propose a number of schemes for storing auxiliary views that enable consistent and efficient lineage tracing in a multi-source data warehouse. We report on a performance study of the various schemes, identifying which schemes perform best in which settings. Based on our results, we have implemented a lineage tracing package in the WHIPS data warehousing system prototype at Stanford. With this package, users can select view tuples of interest, then efficiently ``drill through'' to examine the exact source tuples that produced the view tuples of interest.