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Load checks outside the app

You author and approve rules in DQX Studio, but you don't have to run them there. Studio keeps its rules in own catalog, so they can be loaded and run outside the app — no export needed.

Studio exposes its approved rules through a dqx-core-compatible view, dq_rules_core, that the standard DQX Core DQEngine.load_checks API reads directly.

Load approved rules​

Point LakebaseChecksStorageConfig at the view and pass the table you want the rules for as run_config_name:

from databricks.sdk import WorkspaceClient
from databricks.labs.dqx.engine import DQEngine
from databricks.labs.dqx.config import LakebaseChecksStorageConfig

engine = DQEngine(WorkspaceClient())

checks: list[dict] = engine.load_checks(
    LakebaseChecksStorageConfig(
        # <lakebase-database>.<studio-schema>.dq_rules_core
        location="databricks_postgres.dqx_studio.dq_rules_core",
        instance_name="<your-lakebase-instance>",   # Studio's Lakebase instance
        run_config_name="main.sales.orders",        # the table the rules apply to
    )
)

# Run the Studio-authored rules against your own DataFrame
checked_df = engine.apply_checks_by_metadata(df, checks)

Only approved rules are loaded — drafts and rejected rules are never returned. You get the table's current approved set, so no version pinning is needed. There's no argument for loading a single rule; if you want just one, filter the returned list in your own code.

Cross-table SQL checks have no single home table and appear under __sql_check__/<name> instead of a table name.

Access you'll need

dq_rules_core lives in Studio's Lakebase Postgres database, so a reader outside the app — an engineer, or a pipeline's service principal — needs an administrator to grant two things:

  • CAN_USE on the Lakebase database instance, so the reader can connect to it (see the Databricks database instance permissions docs).

  • A Postgres SELECT on the view:

    GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA dqx_studio TO "<principal>";
    GRANT SELECT ON dqx_studio.dq_rules_core TO "<principal>";

dqx_studio here is Studio's Lakebase schema (lakebase_schema_name, default dqx_studio). It does not follow the Unity Catalog storage prefix. <principal> is the Postgres role for the reader's identity — for a service principal, its application id. SELECT on the view is enough; readers don't need access to the underlying dq_resolved_rules table.

When a service principal does the reading (for example a scheduled pipeline), also set client_id to its application id on the LakebaseChecksStorageConfig so the connection authenticates as that SP — client_id="<service-principal-application-id>". A user running load_checks interactively omits client_id, and the connection uses their own identity.

Notes and limits​

  • Approved only. The view excludes drafts and rejected rules by design — approve a rule in Studio before a pipeline can load it.
  • Read-only. dq_rules_core is a view: author and manage rules in the app; pipelines only read.
  • No version pinning. The dq_rules_core view exposes only the currently approved rules and recomputes rule_set_fingerprint from them, so a table has just one fingerprint at any moment — there's no history to load. Passing an older rule_set_fingerprint to load_checks returns an empty list, so it's only useful to confirm the set hasn't changed since you last loaded it, not to retrieve a past version. (Version pinning does work when dqx-core owns the rules table directly, rather than through Studio's view.)