Column Description Propagation ✨

How Catalog leverages Column Lineage to increase documentation coverage

It is frequent for a column to be reused "as is" by downstream tables. In that case, the column will be called in the "Select" SQL clause, without any modification.

In that case, why should you document the downstream columns? You're right, you should not have to! And Catalog solves that for you this way:

In the picture below, user.account_id inherits its description from its parent column in the opportunity table

Requirements:

There are just 3 simple requirements for this feature to be activated:

1. Parent and child column need to have the same exact name

2. Child column is generated directly from parent without any SQL transformations

3. Child column has one and only one parent

Dashboards fields are out of scope on this feature. As such, it is not possible from descriptions to propagate from table columns to dashboard fields