Platform Overview
What BoltPipeline is, what problem it solves, and how the Plan → Certify → Operate lifecycle works end to end.
The problem
SQL pipelines are hard to govern at scale
Most data teams run their SQL pipelines as a collection of scripts, notebooks, or dbt models tied together with duct tape. There is no shared standard for how a pipeline gets built, validated, reviewed, or promoted to production. Every team does it differently. Failures are caught late. Audits are painful.
BoltPipeline is a governed lifecycle platform for SQL data pipelines. It standardizes how pipelines are designed, certified, and operated — giving every team a consistent, auditable, production-safe workflow — without asking you to learn a new query language or rebuild your existing SQL.
What you get
Three things BoltPipeline gives you
Governed design
SQL pipelines designed with explicit step structure, dependency graphs, and SCD policies — reviewed and certified before any code runs in production.
Version immutability
Once certified, a pipeline version is immutable. The same artifact that passed certification is exactly what runs in Dev, Integration, and Production — with no changes possible.
Continuous observability
Drift monitoring runs continuously across all environments. Schema changes, data volume anomalies, freshness violations, and PII exposure are all detected automatically.
The lifecycle
Plan → Certify → Operate
Every pipeline in BoltPipeline moves through three phases. You cannot skip a phase — the system enforces the progression.
Plan
The Plan phase is where you design your pipeline. Add SQL steps, assign target tables, choose SCD types, and define the dependency order. You can edit freely — nothing has run yet, no commitments have been made.
- Add, edit, or remove SQL steps at any time
- BoltPipeline shows you the dependency graph as you build
- Each step targets one output table with one SCD policy
- You can write SQL in the console, paste it in, or import from a file
Certify
Certification is the contract gate. BoltPipeline validates your plan against structural rules, resolves all dependencies, checks column lineage, and compiles the execution artifact. If anything fails, you get a detailed failure report — fix it and re-certify. There is no limit on attempts.
- SQL syntax and semantic validation
- Dependency resolution and cycle detection
- Column lineage tracing
- SCD compatibility checks
- Generates the immutable deployment artifact on success
Operate
Once certified, the pipeline enters the Operate phase. Agents pick up the certified artifact and execute it against your data warehouse. The pipeline moves through three environments — Development, Integration, and Production — with a governed promotion workflow at each step.
- Runs in Development first — validate against real data
- Promote to Integration for stakeholder sign-off
- Promote to Production for live execution
- Drift monitoring is active in all environments
- The certified SQL never changes — version immutability is enforced
Data privacy
We do not see your data
BoltPipeline operates on your SQL — the structure of your transformations — not on your actual data. Your pipeline executes inside your own data warehouse via the BoltPipeline agent, which runs in your infrastructure and connects back to the platform over a secure, authenticated channel.
The only exceptions are narrow and explicit:
- If a SQL statement fails during execution, BoltPipeline collects the error message to surface it in the console. Error messages may occasionally contain data values — we attempt to automatically redact sensitive columns, but you should be aware of this.
- Metadata collected by the Enterprise Model (column names, data types, row counts, null rates) is stored in BoltPipeline to power lineage, drift detection, and AI-assisted design features. This is schema-level metadata, not the values in your rows.
Your raw business data — the rows in your warehouse — stays entirely within your infrastructure. BoltPipeline never queries your tables for row-level data.
No lock-in
Open formats, portable artifacts
BoltPipeline is opinionated about governance, but not about your infrastructure. Certified pipelines generate open, portable artifacts that your existing tooling can consume.
Export certified SQL
Download the full, certified SQL for any pipeline version. The SQL is plain — no BoltPipeline-specific syntax, no proprietary format. You own it.
Airflow-compatible scheduling
Certified pipelines generate a scheduling artifact compatible with Apache Airflow. Feed it to your existing Airflow environment for DAG-driven execution.
Warehouse-native execution
SQL runs directly in your Snowflake, BigQuery, or other compatible warehouse. BoltPipeline does not move data through its own infrastructure.
BI tool compatible by design
BoltPipeline feeds your BI tools — it does not replace them. Tableau, Power BI, Looker connect directly to the tables BoltPipeline keeps fresh and validated.