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

Introducing Data Contracts

In the previous chapter, we looked at the problems we need to solve, and why it requires a new kind of data architecture. In this chapter, we’ll introduce data contracts as our solution. We’ll provide a definition and explore exactly what it is and how it solves those problems.

One of the best analogies for data contracts is that they act as APIs for your data. That sounds simple, but it’s a fundamental change in how we build our data architecture. As we’ll see later in this chapter, by thinking about providing an API for data, you’ll start defining expectations around that API and consider the ownership and responsibilities. People often refer to an API as a contract between the provider and consumer, and it’s that idea that eventually led to me calling them data contracts.

But an API is just one example of an interface, and really, it’s interfaces that are the key to designing and implementing an architecture...