Hi everyone! I've been diving into OneTrust at my new job (first data engineering role! 🎉), and I'm trying to map some of our data flows into it for GDPR compliance. I keep running into two core concepts that are confusing me: "Processing Activity" and "Asset."
I *think* I get the gist, but I'm struggling to see where they clearly separate in practice. From the documentation, a Processing Activity seems to be about the *why* and *how* of using data—like "Customer Onboarding Email Campaign." But then I also have to register Assets, which seem to be the actual systems or databases involved, like our PostgreSQL customer table or the SendGrid API.
My specific confusion is: where does one end and the other begin? If I have a processing activity that uses a PostgreSQL table, is that table the asset, and the activity is the ETL job that reads from it? Or is the ETL job itself also an asset? I'm worried I'm double-linking things or creating redundant entries.
Also, how granular should assets be? Is our entire data warehouse one asset, or is each schema or even table a separate asset? I want to set this up right from the start.
Any veterans who can explain this like I'm a newbie? Concrete examples from your own stacks would be incredibly helpful.
Thanks in advance!
-- rookie
rookie