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2025

Why Column-Level Lineage Matters for dbt: Comparing the Options

Column-level lineage was a hot topic during 2024, with many data platforms and tools adding this feature to their software and boasting the benefits of column-level lineage for data workflows.

In this article, I’ll take a look at how column-level lineage works in dbt, in both open-source and dbt Cloud, and through SQLMesh; and see how the usage and workflow differs between these platforms.

Column-level lineage in dbt Explorer showing columns as nodes
Column-level lineage in dbt Explorer showing columns as nodes

Seeing lineage in your transformation platform, especially during data modeling updates, is particularly important because it’s at this stage that you most need to understand the impact of your actions.

Meet Recce at Data Council and Data Reboot, Data Renegades Happy Hour

Data Council is one of our favorite conferences: thousands of Data & AI practitioners, hundreds of cutting-edge talks, and endless opportunities to connect and be inspired. If you're in the data space, it's the event you don’t want to miss.

At Recce, we love talking to people who’ve encountered the challenges we’re passionate about. We believe data development is fundamentally different from software development. Yes, modern data teams borrow practices from software — version control, CI/CD, testing. But data comes with ambiguity. A 0.5% change in daily active customers might not mean much without business context. Is it correct? Is it broken? It depends.

Recce Is Now SOC 2 Type 1 Compliant!

At Recce, we take the security and integrity of your data seriously. Today, we're excited to announce that Recce has successfully achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance, marking a significant milestone in our commitment to protecting your data and maintaining the highest standards of security.

Find details in our Trust Center.

Recce has achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance
Recce has achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance!

What Does SOC 2 Type 1 Compliance Mean?

Developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls) is an industry-leading standard designed to ensure companies manage customer data securely. A SOC 2 Type 1 audit evaluates and confirms that an organization has robust security controls, policies, and practices in place at a specific point in time.

Recce: Your data change management toolkit

Whether you’re the author of a pull request or the one reviewing it, you’ve got a tough job: figuring out what changed, verifying that the PR does what it’s supposed to, and making sure nothing breaks in production. In large or business-critical dbt projects, this can be a slow, frustrating process. That’s why we built Recce - an open-source toolkit that’s here to make your data modeling validation and pull request (PR) reviews a breeze.

Build the ultimate PR comment to validate your dbt data modeling changes
Build the ultimate PR comment to validate your dbt data modeling changes

What is Recce?

Recce (pronounced “reh-kee”, short for “reconnaissance”) is a suite of change management tools designed to help you compare dbt environments, assess data impacts, and streamline your PR reviews. Recce gives you visibility into the effects of your data modeling changes before they hit production. With Recce, you can take two dbt environments, such as dev and prod, and compare them using the suite of diff tools.