Data Quality

SodaCL

Soda Checks Language

Situational Vendor-led Soda (vendor-driven open source) Since 2022 Single-vendor spec

Judgement: Situational

YAML-first DQ; lighter than Great Expectations, smaller ecosystem.

YAML-based DSL for expressing data quality checks against tables and columns. Belgian roots — appropriately close to home for the Leuven meetup.

Used under the hood by the Data Contract CLI to actually execute the quality checks declared in an ODCS contract.

Why it counts as a standard

SodaCL is the YAML check language Soda publishes — and the part that other tools have standardised on. The Data Contract CLI delegates ODCS quality checks to SodaCL because expressing checks portably matters more than running them in Soda Cloud. The check syntax is the standard surface, even though Soda governs it.

Example

Checks read close to English and compile down to SQL against the warehouse.

checks for dim_customer:
  - row_count between 10 and 1000
  - missing_count(birth_date) = 0
  - duplicate_count(phone) = 0
  - invalid_percent(phone) < 1 %:
      valid format: phone number

At a glance

Category
Data Quality
Governance
Soda (vendor-driven open source)
Status
Widely adopted; vendor-driven
First released
2022

Links

Related standards

Other standards in Data Quality.

See SodaCL in context

Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare SodaCL against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.