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

Defining the governance and controls

In Chapter 5, Embedding Data Governance, we discussed the importance of data governance and how we embed those controls alongside the data. We also spoke about how the responsibility of those controls is assigned to the data generators, supported by a central data governance committee through policies, standards, and tooling.

In this section, we’ll look at exactly how we can define the governance and controls in the data contract.

Every data contract must have an owner. This is the data generator, and it is they who take on the responsibilities and accountabilities we discussed in Chapter 4, Bringing Data Consumers and Generators Closer Together.

Depending on your requirements, you might want to embed some of the following in your data contract:

  • The version number of the contract
  • The service-level agreements (SLAs)
  • How to access the data (for example, is the interface a table in a data warehouse, a topic on a stream...