Data sources

FACE starts from the systems you already run: warehouses and databases, ERPs and SaaS platforms, files and buckets, event buses, telemetry from pallets, readers and trucks, and camera feeds. This section describes each connector as it behaves today. It covers the settings a connection takes, how credentials are held, what Test actually checks, and what Explore and Sample return.

How to read this section

Every connector page answers the same four questions:

1. Which type spellings resolve. FACE lowercases the connection type and strips spaces, underscores and hyphens before looking it up, so Service Now, service-now and servicenow are the same type.
2. Which settings and credentials it reads. Settings are ordinary fields on the connection record. Secrets are kept in a sealed credential bundle and are never returned. See Connections and credentials.
3. What Test does. Some connectors dial the source. Others can only save the configuration. The response tells you which through live_check_performed, and each page says what a successful probe does not establish.
4. What Explore and Sample return. Explore reads catalogue metadata only. Sample reads a bounded set of real rows, one dataset at a time. See Explore, sample and profile.

Connector families

Implementation principles

• Wire protocols are implemented natively. MQTT, LLRP, Modbus-TCP, NMEA 0183, the Kafka handshake, RTSP and ONVIF are written directly against the wire format. FACE adds no third-party protocol library for them.
• An empty answer is never a silent success. When a telemetry or system-of-record connector connects and receives nothing, it reports Success=false and names what it listened to. It does not return an empty table.
• Absence stays absent. When a source does not state a threshold, a unit or a row count, FACE leaves the value unset. It does not fill in a plausible default.
• Every read is bounded. Every connector caps its collection windows, record counts, page counts and body sizes. When a read hits a cap, the result is marked as truncated.
• Observed lineage records structure only. Every extraction through the connector registry writes a lineage record with column names, counts, durations and a query shape. The record never includes result values or credentials.