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

Walking through an example of a data product

Let’s work through a simple example that shows how to create a usable data product. This will solidify the ideas we’ve discussed so far in this chapter by applying them in practice.

Imagine we are building an e-commerce website that sells physical products directly to customers. We have many products and often apply discounts on these products as we react quickly to external factors in the market and internal factors such as our stock levels.

The way these discounts have been modeled and applied to orders has changed several times in the database that drives the service behind our e-commerce service. Initially, we added another field to the products table, but that meant a particular discount could only apply to a specific product, rather than many.

It was then extracted out to a new discounts table, which provided more flexibility in how we applied discounts across our product lines. However, the data was never backfilled...