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

Data contracts and the data mesh

Data mesh was invented by Zhamak Dehghani in 2019 (https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-monolith-to-mesh.html) and is a design pattern for building a domain-oriented, decentralized data platform. It focuses not just on the technology, but also the social and cultural changes required to achieve this goal and solve many of the problems we discussed in Chapter 1, A Brief History of Data Platforms.

The pattern is described through four principles:

  • Domain ownership
  • Data as a product
  • Self-serve data platform
  • Federated computational governance

Let’s go through each principle in turn and discuss how they relate to data contracts.

Domain ownership

Data mesh proposes a domain-oriented approach to organizing the responsibility and ownership of the data, where this ownership is decentralized to the business domains closest to the data – ideally, the data generators. They are the ones who know most about the data...