jargon

Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger

you need to know whether dropping this one column breaks anything, not whether the table is used.

Column-level lineage

Also calledfield-level lineage

Lineage tracked per column rather than per table, so a change can be scoped to the fields that actually feed something. Table-level lineage answers 'is this used', which for a wide table is always yes and therefore useless for making a decision. The column-level version is what turns a deprecation from a negotiation with everyone into a message to three people.

Commonly confused with