Data Contracts

To build reliable data products we need a data platform that provides us capabilities to do so.

I wrote yesterday about how important a data catalog becomes when you move to a decentralised and autonomous data architecture built on data contracts.

When you’ve successfully built an autonomous, contract-driven data platform, you’ll find the number of data contracts explode.

One of the many benefits of a contract-based data platform is that it ensures consistency over how data is created, managed, and consumed across your organisation.

Platforms in general, and data platforms in particular, can be a powerful enabler for an organisation.

Once you have a data contract defined you can represent it in as many different ways as you want.

Data contracts can be used to implement a data mesh.

Consider the four principles of data mesh:

People new to data contracts often ask “how is that different to a schema?”.

And it’s a fair question, as schemas also describe data structures in a human and machine readable format.

Data is created by various systems and applications owned by various teams. Without attention that will naturally lead to divergent data as they each decide how best to create and model the data they own.

When delivering on a large project (data contracts, data mesh, or any large project) you need to realise value early and often.