Tracing the lineage of view data in a warehousing environment

We consider the view data lineage problem in a warehousing environment: For a given data item in a materialized warehouse view, we want to identify th e set of source data items that produced the view item. We formally define the lineage problem, develop lineage tracing algorithms for relational view s with aggregation, and propose mechanisms for performing consistent lineag e tracing in a multisource data warehousing environment. Our results can fo rm the basis of a tool that allows analysts to browse warehouse data, selec t view tuples of interest, and then "drill-through" to examine the exact so urce tuples that produced the view tuples of interest.