Data source

Learn more about Notion’s data source object.

Data sources are the individual tables of data that live under a Notion database. Pages are the items (or children) in a data source. Page property values must conform to the property objects laid out in the parent data source object.

Diagram of the new Notion API data model. A database is a parent of one or more data sources, each of which parents zero or more pages. Previously, databases could only have one data source, so the concepts were combined in the API until 2025.

As of API version 2025-09-03, there’s a suite of APIs for managing data sources:

• Create a data source: add an additional data source for an existing Database
• Update a data source: update attributes, such as the properties, of a data source
• Retrieve a data source
• Query a data source

Object fields

Properties marked with an asterisk (*) are available to connections with any capabilities. Other properties require read content capabilities in order to be returned from the Notion API. For more information on connection capabilities, see the capabilities guide.

Field	Type	Description	Example value
object*	string	Always "data_source".	"data_source"
id*	string (UUID)	Unique identifier for the data source.	"2f26ee68-df30-4251-aad4-8ddc420cba3d"
properties*	object	Schema of properties for the data source as they appear in Notion. key string The name of the property as it appears in Notion. value object A Property object.
parent	object	Information about the data source’s immediate parent. Most data sources are parented by a database (type: "database_id"). Some externally synced data sources can be parented by another data source (type: "data_source_id") and include the containing database_id. See Parent object.	{"type": "database_id", "database_id": "842a0286-cef0-46a8-abba-eac4c8ca644e"}
database_parent	object	Information about the containing database’s parent. See Parent object.	{ "type": "page_id", "page_id": "af5f89b5-a8ff-4c56-a5e8-69797d11b9f8" }
created_time	string (ISO 8601 date and time)	Date and time when this data source was created. Formatted as an ISO 8601 date time string.	"2020-03-17T19:10:04.968Z"
created_by	Partial User	User who created the data source.	{"object": "user", "id": "45ee8d13-687b-47ce-a5ca-6e2e45548c4b"}
last_edited_time	string (ISO 8601 date and time)	Date and time when this data source was updated. Formatted as an ISO 8601 date time string.	"2020-03-17T21:49:37.913Z"
last_edited_by	Partial User	User who last edited the data source.	{"object": "user","id": "45ee8d13-687b-47ce-a5ca-6e2e45548c4b"}
title	array of rich text objects	Name of the data source as it appears in Notion. See rich text object) for a breakdown of the properties.	[ { "type": "text", "text": { "content": "Can I create a URL property", "link": null }, "annotations": { "bold": false, "italic": false, "strikethrough": false, "underline": false, "code": false, "color": "default" }, "plain_text": "Can I create a URL property", "href": null } ]
description	array of rich text objects	Description of the data source as it appears in Notion. See rich text object) for a breakdown of the properties.
icon	Emoji, Icon, Custom emoji, or File	Data source icon. See Icon for all supported types.
archived	boolean	Deprecated. Use in_trash instead. This is an alias for in_trash and always returns the same value.	false
in_trash	boolean	Whether the data source has been trashed.	false

Schema limitations

Notion recommends a max property count of 500 or a max schema size of 50KB. Updates to database schemas that are too large will be blocked to help maintain database performance.