Onboard data sources & datasets

Before you can monitor, test, or enforce data contracts in Soda, you need to connect your data source and onboard your datasets.

Onboarding is the process of:

• Connecting Soda to your data source (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• Discovering available datasets (tables or views)
• Selecting which datasets to monitor and/or validate
• Configuring observability, testing, and scheduling behavior

How you onboard datasets depends on how you deploy Soda.

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Choose your onboarding path

Soda supports two main ways to onboard datasets:

Via Soda Cloud

This approach is ideal if you want:

• No-code dataset onboarding
• Automated dataset discovery
• Built-in metric monitoring
• Data contracts created in the UI
• Centralized scheduling and alerting

Via Soda Core

This approach is ideal if you want:

• Full control in code
• Git-based workflows
• CI/CD integration
• Contract verification inside pipelines
• Support for in-memory datasets

You can also combine both approaches: use Soda Cloud for centralized observability and governance, and Soda Core for pipeline-level validation.

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