Validate Target

The validate target is used to execute a set of assertions in advance of the CREATE and BUILD phases. This is a good place to validate any assumptions on the input data like primary key or record count.

Example

targets:
  validate_input:
    kind: validate
    mode: failFast
    assertions:
      assert_primary_key:
        kind: sql
        tests:
          - query: "SELECT id,count(*) FROM source GROUP BY id HAVING count(*) > 0"
            expected: []

      assert_measurement_count:
        kind: sql
        tests:
          - query: "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM measurements_extracted"
            expected: 2

Fields

• kind (mandatory) (type: string): validate

• description (optional) (type: string): Optional descriptive text of the build target

• assertions (optional) (type: map:assertion): Map of assertions to be executed. The validation is marked as failed if a single assertion fails.

• mode (mandatory) (type: string) (default: failFast): Specify how to proceed in case individual assertions fail. Possible values are failFast, failAtEnd and failNever

Supported Execution Phases

• VALIDATE - The specified assertions will be run in the VALIDATE phase before the CREATE and BUILD phases.

Read more about execution phases.

Dirty Condition

A validate target is always dirty for the VALIDATE execution phase.

Remarks

This build target works very similar to the verify target, except that it is only active during the VALIDATE phase and the default for the mode parameter is set to failFast. Here the assumption is that a validation should check preconditions before a project is executed. If one of these preconditions fail, there is no value in executing the rest of the project. So you want to fail as early as possible to save execution time.