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

When to use data contracts

Now we have a good understanding of what data contracts are and how they solve the problems we saw in Chapter 1, A Brief History of Data Platforms, how do we know when is a good time to adopt data contracts in an organization?

Firstly, it depends on how your organization is using or wants to use its data. As discussed in the previous chapter, many organizations are starting to use data in more business-critical processes or in products they build for their customers. The ability to build these products quickly and effectively depends on the accessibility of easy-to-use, quality data, and data contracts help with the production of that data.

Then, once these data-driven applications are released, data contracts help ensure they stay performant and dependable by tracking the SLOs of the data and managing the evolution of that data, preventing breaking changes that impact downstream consumers.

Even if your organization is not ready to use data for critical...