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

Monitoring and enforcing data contracts

In this section, we’ll look at how to monitor and enforce our data contracts. This is important, as one of the four principles we looked at in Chapter 2, Introducing Data Contracts, is setting expectations. There’s little point in setting these expectations if we cannot prove we’re meeting them. It’s that proof that gives data consumers the confidence to build on this data.

There are three areas where we can add some monitoring and/or enforcement:

  • The data contract’s definition
  • The quality of the data
  • The performance and dependability of the data

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

The data contract’s definition

Data contracts are written by humans and, as such, are susceptible to human error. They are also intended to be self-served, without requiring a central review, as that slows teams down and reduces their autonomy. Therefore, we will want to add some automated...