Maximum flow depth

Big diagrams can have very long paths, or chains of edges. They can take a long time to build, and are canceled if they exceed specified time and size limits for fetching data.

To help you control the size of diagrams, you can specify the maximum flow depth, meaning the flow relation path length from the start flow node set to any other flow node. This aims to improve readability and performance, and reduce the potential for diagrams that are too big to build.

Terminology and details

Terminology	Description
Flow node	A diagram node that matches a diagram view node that is not marked as context. This means that the Context checkbox is not selected and, therefore, the node is situated in the flow region of the diagram. When the start node is a flow node, the start flow node set is only the start asset.
Context node	A diagram node that matches a diagram view node that is marked as context. This means that the Context checkbox is selected and, therefore, the node is situated in the context region of the diagram. When the start node is a context node, the start flow node set is all assets and complex relations that are reachable from the start node by traversing only flow-context and context-context edges.
Start flow node set	The merge of all start node sets of each diagram view node that it matches. When the start node matches multiple diagram view nodes, the start flow node set is the merge of all start node sets of each view node that it matches.
Flow depth	The flow relation path length from the start flow node set to any other flow node.
Flow edge	An edge for which both nodes are flow nodes.

Note Maximum flow depth is ignored when traversing edges that are not flow edges. Flow-context edges and context-context edges are ignored in order to maximize context, which reduces diagram size and improves readability.

Specifying the maximum flow depth

You do not have to enable this feature. You can, however, edit the system-wide maximum flow depth in Collibra Console. This establishes a maximum flow depth for all results diagrams. The default value is 50.

You can also specify the maximum flow depth at the diagram view level. If you specify a value in a diagram view, that value supersedes the system-wide value in Collibra Console

Limitations

It bears mentioning that limiting flow depth does not prevent all diagrams from becoming too big to build. It can be that a single node has a large number of related assets, for example a Schema asset that contains 10,000 Table assets. In this case, the flow depth is only "1", but the diagram will "fan out" and might become too big to build.