Supporting fine-grained data lineage in a database visualization environment

Abstract

The lineage of a datum records its processing history. Because such information can be used to trace the source of anomalies and errors in processed data sets, it is valuable to users for a variety of applications, including the investigation of anomalies and debugging. Traditional data lineage approaches rely on metadata. However, metadata does not scale well to fine-grained lineage, especially in large data sets. For example, it is not feasible to store all of the information that is necessary to trace from a specific floating-point value in a processed data set to a particular satellite image pixel in a source data set. In this paper, we propose a novel method to support fine-grained data lineage. Rather than relying on metadata, our approach lazily computes the lineage using a limited amount of information about the processing operators and the base data. We introduce the notions of weak inversion and verification. While our system does not perfectly invert the data, it uses weak inversion and verification to provide a number of guarantees about the lineage it generates. We propose a design for the implementation of weak inversion and verification in an object-relational database management system.