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

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the concept of data contracts as our solution to the problems identified in Chapter 1, A Brief History of Data Platforms. We’ve provided a definition and discussed how data contracts provide an agreed interface between the generators of data and its consumers. That interface also sets the expectations around that data and how it should be governed. We then have everything we need to facilitate the explicit generation of quality data.

These are the four principles of data contracts, which work together to drive a step change in building reliable, trusted, and effective data platforms, and help us achieve our aim of increasing the value our organizations can get from our data.

By applying these principles, we are shifting the responsibilities left, moving more upstream to the data generators. We’re addressing the data quality and dependability issues at source, by those who have the most knowledge of the data and the ability...