Alation Data Quality SDK

The Alation Data Quality SDK is a production-ready Python library that enables data engineers to execute Alation-governed data quality checks directly within external data pipelines, orchestration frameworks, and CI/CD workflows.

The workflow bridges the gap between governance and engineering: First, you create an SDK-Enabled Monitor within the Alation Data Quality application to define your checks. Then, you use this SDK to execute those checks programmatically in your external environment.

Key Capabilities

• Pushdown Execution: Queries run directly in your data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery) using a "pushdown" model. No data is extracted or stored by Alation.
• Centralized Governance: Checks are authored and managed in the Alation UI, but fetched dynamically by the SDK at runtime. This ensures pipeline logic always reflects the latest governance policies without code changes.
• Pipeline-Native: Designed for seamless integration into Airflow DAGs, Glue jobs, and GitHub Actions with deterministic exit codes for gating pipelines.
• Zero-Config Authentication: Automatically handles OAuth token exchange and securely fetches datasource credentials from Alation, eliminating the need for hardcoded secrets in your scripts.

Common Use Cases

• Pipeline Gating (Airflow/Prefect): Stop a data pipeline immediately if critical quality checks fail, preventing bad data from polluting downstream dashboards.
• CI/CD Quality Gates: Run data quality tests as part of your pull request process to validate data transformations before merging code.
• Post-Load Validation: Automatically verify data freshness and validity immediately after an ETL load completes.

Getting Started

The SDK is available as a standard Python package. For complete installation instructions, API reference, and detailed code examples, please visit the official package documentation.

View Alation Data Quality SDK on PyPI.

For architectural details, see the Alation Data Quality Documentation.