Book Image

Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts

By : Andrew Jones
Book Image

Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts

By: Andrew Jones

Overview of this book

Despite the passage of time and the evolution of technology and architecture, the challenges we face in building data platforms persist. Our data often remains unreliable, lacks trust, and fails to deliver the promised value. With Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, you’ll discover the potential of data contracts to transform how you build your data platforms, finally overcoming these enduring problems. You’ll learn how establishing contracts as the interface allows you to explicitly assign responsibility and accountability of the data to those who know it best—the data generators—and give them the autonomy to generate and manage data as required. The book will show you how data contracts ensure that consumers get quality data with clearly defined expectations, enabling them to build on that data with confidence to deliver valuable analytics, performant ML models, and trusted data-driven products. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of how data contracts can revolutionize your organization’s data culture and provide a competitive advantage by unlocking the real value within your data.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Why Data Contracts?
4
Part 2: Driving Data Culture Change with Data Contracts
8
Part 3: Designing and Implementing a Data Architecture Based on Data Contracts

A step-change in building data platforms

To start this section, we’ll explain exactly what we mean by a contract-driven data architecture. We’ll explore how it is powered by using data contracts as the place to capture the metadata that describes the data, and we’ll see just how powerful it can be to create a contract-driven data architecture. We’ll show why we believe it is a step-change in building data platforms.

We’ll finish by walking through a case study from GoCardless, where we implemented a solution we thought was promoting autonomy but wasn’t as successful as we expected! What we learned from that greatly influenced our implementation of data contracts, where we have been much more successful in promoting autonomy through a self-serve interface.

We’ll explore the following topics in turn:

  • Building generic data tooling
  • Introducing a data infrastructure team
  • A case study from GoCardless in promoting autonomy...