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

Discovering data contracts

As the amount of data contracts increase and we successfully shift ownership of those left to the data generators, the ownership of data increases. That will make it more difficult for data consumers to know where the data is, how to access it, and who owns it.

There are two related tools that can help us with this problem: a data catalog, and data lineage. In this section, we’ll introduce each of these tools in turn and explain why they are important when implementing data contracts in your organization.

We’ll cover the following topics in this section:

  • What is a data catalog?
  • Why are data catalogs important for discovering data contracts?
  • What is data lineage?
  • Why is data lineage important for data contracts?

What is a data catalog?

Before discussing how data catalogs help us discover data products built with data contracts, let’s first explain what a data catalog is.

A data catalog is an inventory...