Glossary

Common terms used in Bobsled, helpful in the context of the documentation and the Bobsled universe.

Account

An Account in Bobsled refers to your organization’s workspace that an individual user has access to; it contains all configuration settings, metadata, data pipelines, Data Products, Consumers, and system activity. Your individual account has roles and permissions associated with it.

Application

The Application—sometimes referred to as Bobsled Application—is the primary user interface (GUI) through which users interact with Sledhouse and Transfers. It enables creation, configuration, and monitoring of Sledhouse Tables, Data Products, Consumers, and destinations, while also supporting automation and integration workflows.

Backfill

Backfill is the process of populating historical data into a Data Product after its initial creation. This is useful for onboarding consumers who require data from a prior period or for reloading data following schema changes or late-arriving updates. Backfills can be triggered manually or automatically, depending on configuration.

Bobsled Data Types

Bobsled Data Types refer to the standardized set of data types supported by Bobsled for describing and enforcing schema compatibility across platforms and destinations. These types abstract away source-specific implementation details (e.g., Snowflake vs. BigQuery) to ensure a consistent interface when defining Sledhouse Tables or Data Products. They include common primitives such as STRING, INTEGER, FLOAT, BOOLEAN, and DATE, and are designed to align with cross-platform compatibility rules. Bobsled automatically maps native source types to these standardized types and alerts users to incompatible or ambiguous mappings during schema creation.

Data source

In Bobsled, a Data source is a connection to the data provider's data location, a bucket containing files, or a data warehouse with tables. You can set up sources in Bobsled to access the data you want to send to a consumer via a Share. Once you have a source set up, you can easily configure a share to use it so a single source can be used across multiple shares and consumers. See currently supported sources.

Destination

The target where the data is transferred or shared. Bobsled supports two types of destinations:

• Cloud Data Warehouse destinations

• File Storage destinations

Bobsled-managed destination

In Bobsled, a destination is a fully managed instance of the chosen platform that provides a secure and isolated environment for your data.  When you create a destination, Bobsled automatically sets up a dedicated account and the required infrastructure for the chosen platform, which is only used by your organization. This means that you don't need any pre-existing knowledge, accounts, or relationships with the target platform to share data in your consumer's chosen platform. Bobsled also supports writing directly to select externally managed destinations. See currently supported Destinations.

NOTE:
If you are a consumer who has been granted access to shared data via Bobsled, and you want to learn how to access that data, see the ‘Consuming a transfer’ guide for the relevant Destination.

External destination

An External Destination refers to a consumer-managed data environment where Bobsled delivers data but does not control or store it. Examples include customer-owned Amazon S3 buckets or Snowflake accounts. Bobsled manages access and schema orchestration, but the consumer owns the infrastructure.

Consumer organizations

The organization to which a Provider is transferring data. Learn how to Create and Manage Consumers and how consumer organizations affect billing.

Data Consumer

A Data Consumer is the destination endpoint that receives data via a Data Product. It can be a managed service (e.g., Bobsled-managed S3 or Snowflake) or an externally hosted platform to which Bobsled orchestrates access.

Data Fulfillment

Fulfillment refers to the action of delivering a Data Product to a Data Consumer. Bobsled tracks fulfillment status, destination-specific access over the delivery lifecycle.

Data Product

A Data Product in Bobsled is a curated, shareable view or serialization of data derived from one or more Sledhouse Tables or other Data Products. Users can apply column and row-level filters, with additional metadata or reference tables to share with Data Consumers.

Custom Data Product

A Custom Data Product is a version of a Data Product that has been filtered or modified specifically for a given Consumer. This can include column selection, row filtering, field renaming, or custom logic. Custom Data Products ensure that consumers receive only the data they are authorized to use, tailored to their requirements.

Entitlements

Entitlements define what portion of a Data Product a consumer can access—either the full dataset or a customized subset based on applied filters or row-level restrictions.

Schema

A Schema defines the structure of a transfer object, Sledhouse Table, or Data Product, including its columns, data types, and metadata. In Data Product fulfillment, Bobsled allows schema evolution and provides tools to manage compatibility, add descriptions, exclude columns, and trace changes over time.

Share

A share comprises configuration settings for a source dataset, destination platform, and region, data access permissions, loading semantics, data transfer frequency, and an activity tracking event log. It is a centralized management hub where users can perform actions such as pausing transfers, revoking access, and deleting shared data.

Sledhouse Table

A Sledhouse Table is a centralized, queryable table created by replicating data from a source system into Bobsled-managed Iceberg storage on R2. These tables act as a foundational layer for building and distributing data products to downstream consumers.

Provider

Your organization which is using Bobsled to transfer data to a consumer organization.

Transfer

A transfer, or data transfer, is the process of moving data from the provider's source data to any given destination under a Share.