Illustration of a digital data structure featuring a centralized Snowflake server icon, connected to cloud symbols with node links, representing data lineage and compliance strategies in 2025.

Published in: Snowflake Cloud Data Solutions

Mastering Data Lineage and Traceability in Snowflake for Better Compliance and Data Quality

Author Deepinder

Published on: April 8, 2025

Mastering Data Lineage and Traceability in Snowflake for Better Compliance and Data Quality

In data-driven businesses, comprehending the source, flow, and alterations of data is essential. Data lineage is essential for assuring transparency, maintaining data integrity, and facilitating informed decision-making.

Traditional data lineage tracing systems typically need human documentation and intricate procedures; however, the Snowflake Data Cloud provides an efficient and robust alternative. Snowflake’s integrated data lineage features enable enterprises to natively collect, visualize, and analyze data lineage within its cloud-native framework.

This article will explore the ideas of data lineage and traceability in Snowflake, the associated technological hurdles, and how Snowflake’s distinctive features facilitate compliance more effectively than before. We will examine practical applications and offer implementable code samples to facilitate your initiation.

Importance of Data Lineage

Data lineage essentially provides a visual or documentation tool showing the path of data from its source to its destination. It helps answer questions such “What is the origin of this data?” and “What changes has it experienced?” By fully understanding data lineage, organizations may ensure data quality and make informed decisions based on correct and dependable data.

Furthermore, data lineage is a necessary tool for increasing responsibility and openness inside a company. By means of a clear data lineage process, companies may foster a data-driven culture and inspire stakeholders with confidence. This openness helps to spot possible data anomalies or conflicts, therefore enabling quick fixes to maintain data integrity.

Importance of Data Traceability

Data traceability entails recording specifics regarding the source, flow, and manipulation of data pieces. It records and audits data changes and ensures data traceability. Data traceability helps firms prevent data loss, comply with industry rules, and prove compliance.

Data governance frameworks depend on data traceability, which goes beyond record-keeping. Data quality, decision-making, and data breach and inaccuracy concerns can be improved with unambiguous traceability procedures.

Business trust and credibility depend on data traceability. It shows quality control, industry standards, and regulatory compliance, proving product and service integrity. Industry sectors that prioritize customer safety and product authenticity need data traceability.

Data traceability promotes organizational accountability. By creating explicit data lineage and audit trails, businesses may empower their teams to own data assets, encourage openness in decision-making, and improve data stewardship.

The Challenges of Tracking Data in Complex Pipelines

Modern data ecosystems are far from straightforward. They involve several phases, tools, and integrations, each of which performs a specialized function. Tracking data transit and changes across such pipelines poses many issues.

Data Silos: When data flows across various systems, tracking can become fragmented.
ETL Complexity: Transformations in Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) or ELT processes sometimes obfuscate the lineage.
Volume and Velocity: As data size increases, manual tracking becomes difficult, if not impossible.

For example, consider a financial institution that processes hundreds of transactions every second. Manually tracking each transition and verifying compliance is not only time-consuming, but also error-prone. Even when leveraging offshore data services to support operational workloads, the complexity remains significant. This is where Snowflake shines.

How Snowflake Simplifies Data Lineage and Traceability

Snowflake offers many metadata views that may be utilized to comprehend data lineage. Nonetheless, these perspectives provide varying degrees of depth and are exclusively accessible on specific Snowflake versions. Be sure to consult the Snowflake documentation to confirm whether your company can access these views.

OBJECT_DEPENDENCIES Perspective: The Macroscopic Lens of Objects

The OBJECT_DEPENDENCIES view illustrates the interdependencies across objects in Snowflake, including views and user-defined functions (UDFs). For instance, one may identify the objects that rely on a certain table:

				
					SELECT * 
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.OBJECT_DEPENDENCIES
WHERE REFERENCED_OBJECT_NAME= 'orders'

This is a comprehensive list of all Snowflake objects that are contingent upon the orders table. One of the most beneficial uses is identifying the views dependent on a table, which is very advantageous for those who rely significantly on views. A lineage devoid of a table-to-view relationship resembles a map lacking state roads.

Nonetheless, OBJECT_DEPENDENCIES will not provide table or column dependencies as defined by SQL queries, which provide the fundamental basis of our lineage map. They encompass both interstate highways and municipal roads. To do this, we must utilize the ACCESS_HISTORY view.

ACCESS_HISTORY View: Going over Query Footprints

The ACCESS_HISTORY view offers a record of DML activities (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) performed on your tables. For instance, one may retrieve all items linked to a certain query identified by query_id:

				
					SELECT DIRECT_OBJECTS_ACCESSED, BASE_OBJECTS_ACCESSED, OBJECTS_MODIFIED
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ACCESS_HISTORY
WHERE QUERY_ID='query_id'

With the JSON responses produced by this query, we can extract the exact dependencies of all queries, allowing us to create a complete map of column-to-column relationships. Crucially, these are the dependencies defined by Snowflake’s query parser, the ultimate source of truth.

ACCESS_HISTORY needs Enterprise Edition (or above), and so it is not available to all clients. If you have access to this view, you should definitely start playing around with it. However, without access to ACCESS_HISTORY, we will have to parse the requests ourselves.

Benefits of Data Lineage

Data lineage is more important than ever as data ecosystems are increasingly vast and sophisticated. It is now the pillar of data management, and using data lineage provides several significant advantages, including:

Data Quality

Any data warehousing system—including Snowflake—can have problems with data quality. Data lineage, however, can let your engineers rapidly and effectively identify the source of a data quality issue, hence enabling their resolution.

Enhanced Data Governance

Snowflake’s data lineage enables companies to create and apply standards, rules, and data governance regulations. Tracking data lineage helps companies to guarantee regulatory compliance, verify data quality, and apply data access and security policies.

Impact Analysis and Change Management

Utilizing data lineage in Snowflake, companies may do impact analysis during data structure, transformation, or process change implementation. It enables companies to properly plan and control changes by helping to identify downstream systems, reports, or analyses that could be impacted by them, therefore reducing risks and interruptions.

Conclusion

Data lineage and traceability are no longer optional; they are essential for companies that want to retain operational transparency and satisfy regulatory requirements. Snowflake’s advanced capabilities, like as metadata views, Streams, Tasks, and tagging, help to streamline this process.

Implementing these solutions allows firms to not only maintain compliance, but also get deeper insights into their data operations. Organizations working with offshore data services can also benefit by combining Snowflake’s lineage features with globally distributed teams to accelerate data governance initiatives.

Mastering Data Lineage and Traceability in Snowflake for Better Compliance and Data Quality