Data Validation Functions (DVFs) enforce data quality rules defined in your tenant’s business model. Traditionally, DVFs execute during the entity lifecycle as part of the ingestion process. If validation fails, the entity is rejected and not saved.

Validation APIs extend this capability by allowing DVF execution before ingestion. Instead of validating data during a save operation, you can validate source data externally and receive structured validation results without persisting records.

Why validate before ingestion

Validating data before ingestion helps identify data quality issues earlier in the data pipeline. By detecting errors at the source, you can reduce ingestion failures, minimize reprocessing, and prevent invalid data from entering downstream workflows.

This approach is particularly useful when integrating Reltio with upstream systems, ETL processes, streaming pipelines, or data profiling tools. Validation can be embedded into those workflows to enforce consistent data quality standards before data reaches the platform.

How pre-ingestion validation works

Pre-ingestion validation uses the same DVF rules configured for entity type attributes in your Reltio tenant. The validation engine evaluates the provided payload against active DVF rules and returns detailed results for each object.

The validation process doesn't create, update, or modify entity records. It evaluates the data and returns validation outcomes, including errors and warnings generated by DVF execution.

This ensures consistent validation behavior between ingestion-based validation and external validation scenarios while maintaining architectural flexibility.

When to use this approach

Use this approach to:

• Enforce data quality rules at the source system before submission to Reltio.
• Integrate validation checks into automated ETL or streaming pipelines.
• Perform large-scale data profiling and quality assessment before migration.
• Reduce ingestion failures caused by predictable validation errors.

Related APIs

To use pre-ingestion validation programmatically, see Validation APIs.