Playground: Instantly Validate and Explore Your Data
After a data pipeline runs successfully, the first question a builder asks is: "Did it work?" The Playground is Arkham's interactive SQL editor, designed to answer that question instantly. It provides a powerful, intuitive interface for the final and most critical phase of the data development lifecycle: validation and exploration.
As an integral part of our platform, the Playground is the primary environment for ad-hoc analysis. It provides a seamless bridge from the Production Tier of your Data Catalog to the underlying query engine, allowing builders to immediately interact with the high-quality data they have just created without switching contexts or tools.

How It Works: Querying Your Production Datasets
Playground provides a seamless bridge from the Production Tier of your Data Catalog to the underlying query engine. This allows you to instantly query your new datasets without switching contexts or tools.

🤖 AI-Assisted Exploration with TARS
While you can always write SQL by hand, TARS accelerates exploration by generating complex queries from natural language. Instead of writing a query, you can simply ask:
"Write a query to count the number of users by country from the @production_users
table."
TARS will generate the correct SQL in the editor, allowing you to get to insights faster.
Key Technical Benefits
- Direct Integration with Data Catalog: Our Playground is seamlessly integrated with our Data Catalog, allowing you to browse and search for datasets directly within the editor. It intelligently prioritizes Production-tier datasets, ensuring you're querying the right data.
- Powerful SQL Editor: Our Playground features a modern SQL editor with syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and query formatting. It also supports the use of decorators to reference datasets, making your queries more readable and maintainable.
- Seamless Exporting: With a single click, you can export the results of any query to a CSV file. This allows you to easily share findings, create reports, or pull data into local tools for further analysis.
- Performance at Scale: The Playground is built on a robust query execution engine that is designed to handle large datasets and complex queries. This ensures that you can get the answers you need, when you need them, without having to wait for long-running queries to complete.
- Data Platform Overview: See how the Playground fits into the end-to-end data workflow.
- Data Catalog: Discover and understand the trusted Production datasets available for querying.
- Pipeline Builder: The upstream tool used to create the Production datasets you'll explore here.
- Workbooks: Promote your ad-hoc queries from the Playground into polished, interactive reports.
- TARS: Your AI co-pilot for generating complex SQL queries from natural language questions.