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

What is a data contract?

We’ll start by defining what a data contract is and break down that definition to explore the key principles that make up a data contract. Having an agreed definition will then allow us to understand how data contracts solve the problems we described in Chapter 1, A Brief History of Data Platforms, and give us the foundations we need in the later chapters as we look at exactly how to build and deploy an architecture built on data contracts – one that ultimately changes our data culture and allows us to extract the most business value from our data.

So, let’s start with a definition. I define a data contract as follows:

A data contract is an agreed interface between the generators of data and its consumers. It sets the expectations around that data, defines how it should be governed, and facilitates the explicit generation of quality data that meets the business requirements.

Those four keywords highlighted are the four key principles...