How to get lineage from Azure Synapse Analytics into Microsoft Purview

This document explains the steps required for connecting an Azure Synapse workspace with a Microsoft Purview account to track data lineage and ingest data sources. The document also gets into the details of the activity coverage scope and supported lineage capabilities.

When you connect Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Purview, whenever a supported pipeline activity is run, metadata about the activity's source data, output data, and the activity will be automatically ingested into the Microsoft Purview Data Map.

If a data source has already been scanned and exists in the data map, the ingestion process will add the lineage information from Azure Synapse Analytics to that existing source. If the source or output doesn't exist in the data map and is supported by Azure Synapse Analytics lineage Microsoft Purview will automatically add their metadata from Synapse Analytics into the data map under the default domain root collection.

This can be an excellent way to monitor your data estate as users move and transform information using Azure Synapse Analytics.

Supported Azure Synapse capabilities

Currently, Microsoft Purview captures runtime lineage from the following Azure Synapse pipeline activities:

Important

Microsoft Purview drops lineage if the source or destination uses an unsupported data storage system.

Copy activity support

Data store Supported
Azure Blob Storage Yes
Azure Cognitive Search Yes
Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL * Yes
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB * Yes
Azure Data Explorer * Yes
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 Yes
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 Yes
Azure Database for MariaDB * Yes
Azure Database for MySQL * Yes
Azure Database for PostgreSQL * Yes
Azure Files Yes
Azure SQL Database * Yes
Azure SQL Managed Instance * Yes
Azure Synapse Analytics * Yes
Azure Dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) * Yes
Azure Table Storage Yes
Hive * Yes
SQL Server * Yes

* Microsoft Purview currently doesn't support query or stored procedure for lineage or scanning. Lineage is limited to table and view sources only.

If you use Self-hosted Integration Runtime, note the minimal version with lineage support for:

  • Any use case: version 5.9.7885.3 or later
  • Copying data into Azure Synapse Analytics via COPY command or PolyBase: version 5.10 or later

Limitations on copy activity lineage

Currently, if you use the following copy activity features, the lineage is not yet supported:

  • Copy data into Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 using Binary format.
  • Compression setting for Binary, delimited text, Excel, JSON, and XML files.
  • Source partition options for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Synapse Analytics, SQL Server, and SAP Table.
  • Copy data to file-based sink with setting of max rows per file.
  • Column level lineage is not currently supported by copy activity when source/sink is resource set.

In additional to lineage, the data asset schema (shown in Asset -> Schema tab) is reported for the following connectors:

  • CSV and Parquet files on Azure Blob, Azure Files, ADLS Gen1, and ADLS Gen2
  • Azure Data Explorer, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Synapse Analytics, SQL Server

Data Flow support

Data store Supported
Azure Blob Storage Yes
Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL * Yes
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 Yes
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 Yes
Azure Database for MySQL * Yes
Azure Database for PostgreSQL * Yes
Azure SQL Database * Yes
Azure SQL Managed Instance * Yes
Azure Synapse Analytics * Yes
Azure Dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) * Yes

* Microsoft Purview currently doesn't support query or stored procedure for lineage or scanning. Lineage is limited to table and view sources only.

Limitations on data flow lineage

  • Data flow lineage may generate folder level resource set without visibility on the involved files.
  • Column level lineage is not currently supported when source/sink is resource set.
  • For the lineage of data flow activity, Microsoft Purview only supports showing the source and sink involved. The detailed lineage for data flow transformation isn't supported yet.
  • Lineage is not supported when flowlets are part of the dataflow.
  • Currently Purview doesn't support lineage reporting for Synapse tables (LakeHouse DB/Workspace DB)

In Microsoft Purview governance portal, you can monitor the Azure Synapse Analytics links.

Next steps

Catalog lineage user guide