External lineage

External lineage is the current Databricks name, previously Bring Your Own Lineage (since June 2026).

Bring Your Own Lineage → External lineage

Lets Unity Catalog record lineage for assets outside Databricks, so first-mile ETL and last-mile BI show up in one end-to-end lineage view alongside the lineage Databricks captures itself.

• It happily catalogs things Databricks never ran a single query on - Salesforce or MySQL sources and Tableau or Power BI dashboards - so one lineage graph spans your full data flow. 🔗
• You can draw the graph by hand in Catalog Explorer, or let Lakeflow Connect managed ingestion pipelines record source-to-destination lineage for you and skip the drawing entirely. 🔗

⚠ Limitations: External lineage is not recorded in the lineage system tables (system.access.table_lineage and system.access.column_lineage), and each metastore is capped at 10,000 external metadata objects and 100,000 external lineage relationships. 🔗

Category

Data governance

In use from

June 2026🔗

Also known as

External metadata, external lineage metadata

Verified

2026-08-20