Skip to main content

Connect to data

Once you have a Data Context, you’ll want to connect to data. In Great Expectations, Datasources simplify connections, by managing configuration and providing a consistent, cross-platform API for referencing data.

Let’s configure your first Datasource: a connection to the data directory we’ve provided in the repo. This could also be a database connection, but for now we’re just using a simple file store.

Start by running the following command:

great_expectations datasource new
What data would you like Great Expectations to connect to?    1. Files on a filesystem (for processing with Pandas or Spark)    2. Relational database (SQL): 1
What are you processing your files with?    1. Pandas    2. PySpark: 1
Enter the path of the root directory where the data files are stored. If files are on local diskenter a path relative to your current working directory or an absolute path.: data

This will now open up a new Jupyter Notebook to complete the Datasource configuration.

The datasource new notebook#

The Jupyter Notebook contains some boilerplate code to configure your new Datasource. You can run the entire notebook as-is, but we recommend changing at least the Datasource name to something more specific.

Edit the second code cell as follows:

datasource_name = "getting_started_datasource"

Then execute all cells in the notebook in order to save the new Datasource. If successful, the last cell will print a list of all Datasources, including the one you just created.

Before continuing, let’s stop and unpack what just happened.

Configuring Datasources#

When you completed those last few steps, you told Great Expectations that:

  • You want to create a new Datasource called getting_started_datasource.
  • You want to use Pandas to read the data from CSV.

Based on that information, the CLI added the following entry into your great_expectations.yml file, under the datasources header:

name: getting_started_datasourceclass_name: Datasourcemodule_name: great_expectations.datasourceexecution_engine:  module_name: great_expectations.execution_engine  class_name: PandasExecutionEnginedata_connectors:    default_runtime_data_connector_name:        class_name: RuntimeDataConnector        batch_identifiers:            - default_identifier_name    default_inferred_data_connector_name:        class_name: InferredAssetFilesystemDataConnector        base_directory: ../data/        default_regex:          group_names:            - data_asset_name          pattern: (.*)
What does the configuration contain?

ExecutionEngine : The ExecutionEngine provides backend-specific computing resources that are used to read-in and perform validation on data. For more information on `ExecutionEngines`, please refer to the following [Core Concepts document on ExecutionEngines](/docs/reference/execution_engine)

DataConnectors : DataConnectors facilitate access to external data stores, such as filesystems, databases, and cloud storage. The current configuration contains both an InferredAssetFilesystemDataConnector, which allows you to retrieve a batch of data by naming a data asset (which is the filename in our case), and a RuntimeDataConnector, which allows you to retrieve a batch of data by defining a filepath. In this tutorial we will only be using the InferredAssetFilesystemDataConnector. For more information on DataConnectors, please refer to the Core Concepts document on Datasources.

This datasource does not require any credentials. However, if you were to connect to a database that requires connection credentials, those would be stored in great_expectations/uncommitted/config_variables.yml.

In the future, you can modify or delete your configuration by editing your great_expectations.yml and config_variables.yml files directly.

For now, let’s move on to creating your first Expectations.