Exploring data usage documentation
- Peter Faber
The basis layout of the data usage information page is structured in a template, which consist of units which has specific fields with information. Engrafo can have many different templates for data usage information. Example: Different things might very well be important to share with your organization from you SAS ETL jobs than from your Power BI data visualizations. And when you agree upon these templates, these configuration items are good to know. (More about that here: Configure metadata documentation layout for Engrafo Data Usage)
Important tip here is that the data references are automatically made as links, you you can use them to jump to any part of the data in the data catalog you want to directly from here.
On top of the template are some important functionalities like editing or copying the information page, favoriting it, seeing the history, and last but not least exploring the data lineage with this current “job” as a starting point.
Clicking the Lineage button, Engrafo automatically generate the data lineage overview diagram and take you to it. Once there you have some options available to you, to dive further into it.
The graph itself is interactive, so you can click on it to jump to any other part of the data journey you want to. This goes for both other data usage information pages or any included table anywhere in the lineage.
Some data journeys are quite long, so you have advanced functionality to limit the amount of steps backwards and forwards in the lineage to focus on. If you have sub-steps with data within jobs, you can also separate them here.
If you want to you can also chose to show columns/variables in the lineage overview. Especially if you have a long data journey with lots of data involved, this turns into almost an artistic flow. Question then becomes: Does it really need ALL the variables involved along the way 😉