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

What Makes Up a Data Contract

In this chapter, we’re going to look at what exactly makes up a data contract. This includes the schema, which describes and documents the structure of the data. We’ll discuss why this is important and show how we can define the schema in several open source schema formats.

A schema can only describe data at a point in time. However, as the needs of the organization change, so too does our data. We’ll explore how we can support the evolution of our data, while still providing data consumers the stability they need to build on this data with confidence.

However, data contracts are more than just a schema. As we’ve discussed in previous chapters, we need our data contracts to capture metadata that describes how the data can be used, how it is governed, and the controls around the data. We’ll show how we do that, and how we can use that metadata to drive tooling and integrate with other services.

By the end of this...