# An engineer is renaming a column on fct_orders Canonical URL: Domain: Pipeline Design ยท Difficulty: medium ## Problem An engineer is renaming a column on fct_orders. Without lineage they have no way to know who breaks; without lineage, an engineer debugging a wrong number on the revenue dashboard has no way to know which pipeline to inspect first. The section's two reads of lineage: forward (if this changes, what else changes; the blast radius) and backward (what produced this; the root cause). Sources include the dbt manifest.json (parsed at compile time), query history (observed at runtime), and OpenLineage events (cross-tool). Trace the blast radius by adding a lineage catalog downstream of the dbt build that captures column-level provenance, plus a lineage-query consumer that reads it forward and backward. ## Related - [All practice problems](https://datadriven.io/problems) - [Mock interview mode](https://datadriven.io/interview/an-engineer-is-renaming-a-column-on-fctorders-without-line-3d793ed0) - [System Design Interview Questions](https://datadriven.io/data-engineering-system-design) - [Data Engineering Interview Prep Guide](https://datadriven.io/data-engineer-interview-prep) - [Daily Challenge](https://datadriven.io/daily) --- Source: DataDriven (https://datadriven.io). 100% free data engineering interview prep. Live code execution against Postgres 16, Python 3.11, and Spark sandboxes. No paywall, no premium tier, no signup gate.