WhereHows

WhereHows is a data discovery and lineage tool built at LinkedIn. It integrates with all the major data processing systems and collects both catalog and operational metadata from them.

Within the central metadata repository, WhereHows curates, associates, and surfaces the metadata information through two interfaces:

• a web application that enables data & linage discovery, and community collaboration
• an API endpoint that empowers automation of data processes/applications

WhereHows serves as the single platform that:

• links data objects with people and processes
• enables crowdsourcing for data knowledge
• provides data governance and provenance based on ownership and lineage

Documentation

The detailed information can be found in the Wiki

Examples in VM

There is a pre-built vmware image (about 11GB) to quickly demonstrate the functionality of WhereHows. Check out the VM Guide

Getting Started

New to Wherehows? Check out the Getting Started Guide

Preparation

First, please get Play Framework (Activator) in place.

# Download Activator
wget https://downloads.typesafe.com/typesafe-activator/1.3.11/typesafe-activator-1.3.11-minimal.zip

# Unzip, Remove zipped folder, move play folder to $HOME
unzip -q typesafe-activator-1.3.11-minimal.zip && rm typesafe-activator-1.3.11-minimal.zip && mv activator-1.3.11-minimal $HOME/

# Add ACTIVATOR_HOME, GRADLE_HOME. Update Path to include new gradle, alias to counteract issues
echo 'export ACTIVATOR_HOME="$HOME/activator-1.3.11-minimal"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

You need to increase the SBT build tool max heap size for building web module

echo 'export SBT_OPTS="-Xms1G -Xmx1G -Xss2M"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Second, please setup the metadata repository in MySQL.

CREATE DATABASE wherehows
  DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
  DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

CREATE USER 'wherehows';
SET PASSWORD FOR 'wherehows' = PASSWORD('wherehows');
GRANT ALL ON wherehows.* TO 'wherehows'

Execute the DDL files to create the required repository tables in wherehows database.

Build

1. Get the source code: git clone https://github.com/linkedin/WhereHows.git
2. Put a few 3rd-party jar files to metadata-etl/extralibs directory. Some of these jar files may not be available in Maven Central or Artifactory. See the download instrucitons for more detail. cd WhereHows/metadata-etl/extralibs
3. Go back to the WhereHows root directory and build all the modules: ./gradlew build
4. Go back to the WhereHows root directory and start the metadata ETL and API service: cd backend-service ; $ACTIVATOR_HOME/bin/activator run
5. Go back to the WhereHows root directory and start the web front-end: cd web ; $ACTIVATOR_HOME/bin/activator run Then WhereHows UI is available at http://localhost:9000 by default. For example, $ACTIVATOR_HOME/bin/activator run -Dhttp.port=19001 will use port 19001 to serve UI.

Contribute

Want to contribute? Check out the Contributors Guide

Community

Want help? Check out the Gitter chat room and Google Groups