A Provenance Column is a column that is populated by a source plugin - either a reader or parser. The column includes some metadata from the source plugin that can be useful in downstream processing. For example:
One important use of provenance columns is to construct a source watermark that can be stored at the sink and then used for restart / recovery after failure - see Using Watermarks.
By convention, all provenance column names start with SQLSTREAM_PROV.
For more information about provenance columns for particular plugins, see: