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

Managing the evolution of data

Data evolves over time, just as your organization does, and we’ll need to manage that appropriately in order to minimize the impact of that evolution on downstream users – particularly the most critical use cases. However, just like your organization, your core models and data products will also be stable over many years.

You can see that reflected in the public APIs, for those that have them, and how little they change over time. There’s little reason why our internal data products should change much more frequently than those if we build them with the same discipline and a product mindset.

Given that, it’s fine for there to be some friction when it comes to evolving our data contracts. In fact, this friction is desirable. By having some friction here, we’re signifying the importance of the data contract and the commitment we make to its maintenance and stability over the long term.

How much friction there...