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

Creating libraries for data generators

As well as making it easy for data generators to provision and manage resources, we can also make it easy for them to generate and publish their data to those resources. One way to do that is to supply some client libraries. These can help with data conversion, perform validation checks, or perform custom logic that helps ensure data generated by different services is consistent.

These client libraries are also useful to the consumers of the data, helping with the deserialization of data or the deduction of any custom logic.

You could decide to implement these libraries yourself, using the raw data contract as the input. Alternatively, you can convert the data contract into an open source format and use the existing ecosystem.

That’s what we’ll be doing. In this section, we’ll convert our data contract to JSON Schema (https://json-schema.org) and learn how to use existing libraries to validate our data, as highlighted...