ThinkData Works launched a new data lineage solution that allows companies to better visualize data flows, improving efficiency and observability for an organization’s entire data ecosystem.

The offering provides a comprehensive view of data pipelines, displaying an active graph of data lineage from warehouse to model and letting users analyze and explore pipelines to ensure quality, limit risk, and reduce cost.

The new tool will provide critical visibility into data relationships, enabling upstream and downstream monitoring of data pipelines for rapid impact analysis, quality control, and enhanced governance. The solution, which uses ThinkData’s powerful data catalog to predict lineage relationships between datasets, is supported by ThinkData Works’ characteristically intuitive user interface.

Rather than modeling the entirety of the data catalog in a single view, ThinkData Works’ solution emphasizes the inspection of data pipelines, products, and relationships, giving users the freedom to analyze the composition of these relationships and quickly pinpoint risks and dependencies. Prioritizing efficiency, increased time savings, and reduced cost, ThinkData Works’ data lineage solution differentiates itself by providing a focused and easy-to-navigate interface that encourages analysis by both technical and business users.

“When we started thinking about how we’d build a lineage solution, we knew exactly what we didn’t want to do,” says Lewis Wynne-Jones, VP Product at ThinkData Works. “We’ve seen too many lineage solutions that demo well but completely fall apart when they’re dropped into a production environment. In order to be truly useful, data lineage needs to be clear, practical, and easy-to-interpret. We tested our solution against pipelines generating models out of thousands of datasets and within minutes were able to spot dependencies and risks that we’d never seen before. That was when we knew we’d built something incredible.”

Increasingly, lineage solutions are used to support transparency and governance for data-driven organizations that have data from many different environments feeding into downstream analysis, business intelligence tools, and models. Data lineage provides a lens into where data originates, how it is transformed over time, and where it ends up, giving organizations that use lineage solutions critical information that increases efficiency, ensures trust, and enables innovation.

“Existing data lineage products don’t do enough to help users track and manage their data — we’re bridging the gap that will bring lineage from a compliance requirement to a practical part of data workflows,” said Bryan Smith, Co-founder and CEO of ThinkData Works. “The primary focus of a data lineage solution should be to inform users on how data is built, where it’s coming from, and what happens to it over time. Our new offering enables users to unlock the full potential of their data to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving business landscape.”

In May, ThinkData Works introduced new platform capabilities to support data virtualization from 40+ data sources, improving their unique position as a data catalog solution that enables both data and metadata management. With the launch of data lineage functionality, ThinkData Works’ platform now enables users to connect to data where it resides, manage metadata, govern use, integrate seamlessly, and better analyze data health and quality from a single platform, bringing error triage, reporting, and auditability to organizations without adding overhead or the need for new specialists and costly processes.