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Organize datasets

Last modified on 26-Sep-24

With dozens, or even hundreds of datasets in your Soda Cloud account, it may be laborious to try to find the data quality information you’re looking for. To facilitate your search for specific data quality status, consider defining your own Attributes and Tags for datasets, then use filters to narrow your search.

Define dataset attributes

Define new attributes for datasets in your organization that your colleagues can use to categorize datasets for easy identification and discovery. Consider adding multiple attributes to access precise cross-sections of data quality.

  • by organizational department: Product Marketing, Engineering-FE, Finance-AP, Customer Success
  • by product
  • by data domain: Customer data, Product data, Order & Fulfillment data
  • by internal objectives and key results (OKR)


  1. As a user with the permission to do so in your Soda Cloud account, navigate to your avatar > Attributes > New Attribute.
  2. Follow the guided steps to create the new attribute. Use the details below for insight into the values to enter in the fields in the guided steps.
Field or Label Guidance
Label Enter the key for the key:value pair that makes up the attribute. For example, if you define a dataset attribute’s key department, its value could be marketing or finance.
Resource Type Select Dataset to define an attribute for a dataset.
Type Define the type of input a dataset owner may use for the value that pairs with the attribute’s key:
Single select
Multi select
Checkbox
Text
Number
Date
Note that during a scan, Soda validates that the type of input for an attribute’s value matches the expected type. For example, if your attribute’s type is Number and the dataset owner enters a value of one instead of 1, the scan produces an error to indicate the incorrect attribute value.
Allowed Values Applies only to Single select and Multi select. Provide a list of values that a check author may use when applying the attribute key:value pair to a check.
Description (Optional) Provide details about the check attribute to offer guidance for your fellow Soda users.

Adjust attributes

  • Once created, you cannot change the type of your attribute. For example, you cannot change a checkbox attribute into a multi-select attribute.
  • Once created, you can change the display name of an attribute.
  • For a single- or multi-select attribute, you can remove, change, or add values to the list of available selections. However, if you remove or change values on such a list, you cannot search for the deleted or previous value in the dataset filter.

Apply an attribute to a dataset

While only a Soda Cloud Admin can define or revise dataset attributes, any Admin, Manager, or Editor for a dataset can apply attributes to it.

  1. Navigate to the Datasets dashboard, click the stacked dots next to a dataset, then select Edit Dataset. Use the attributes fields to apply the appropriate attributes to the dataset.
  2. While editing a dataset, consider adding Tags to the dataset as well. Use tags to:
    • identify datasets that are associated with a particular marketing campaign
    • identify datasets that are relevant for a particular customer account
    • identify datasets whose quality is critical to business operations, or to categorize datasets according to their criticality in general, such as “high”, “medium”, and “low”.
    • identify datasets that populate a particular report or dashboard
  3. After saving your changes and applying tags and attributes to multiple datasets, use the Filters in the Datasets dashboard to display the datasets that help narrow your study of data quality, then click Save Collection to name the custom filtered view.
  4. In the future, use the dropdown in the Checks dashboard to quickly access your collection again.

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Documentation always applies to the latest version of Soda products
Last modified on 26-Sep-24