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.

---

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.