Data Contracts

Data contracts are often considered as a solution to improve the change management and quality of an organisations data.

I often get asked: How do I get data producers to publish their own data contracts?

While a lot of people associate data contracts with data quality (and I did call my book Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts!), one of the problems data contracts is great at helping to solve for is change management.

When building a (data) platform you end up thinking a lot about the abstractions you are providing, and the trade-offs they cause.

What key business processes depend on your data?

Do the owners and users of those processes understand how dependable the data is?

On the latest episode of the Data & AI podcast I joined Deepak and Dan as we demystified data contracts.

When building a data platform I’m often thinking about how to reduce friction for my users. I want them to have a great experience that allows them to get/build what they need quickly and easily.

Many data platforms start with a change data capture (CDC) service to extract data from an organisations transactional databases - the source of truth for their most valuable data.

There is strong alignment between the goals of data mesh and data contracts.

In fact, data mesh was one of the inspirations behind data contracts.

I enjoyed this post by Ryan Collingwood on what the 🤬 is a Data Contract? (which he also published on LinkedIn). It’s a great summary of some of the qualities he feels define a data contract.