Data Contracts

How do you like your data?

Do you want it to be agile? So it can change at any moment, depending on the needs or wants of those producing the data? If a team decides it wants to model an object differently, with different IDs, they can do so. They are moving fast and breaking things.

Data governance is changing.

With the move towards data mesh we’re seeing a move away from centralised governance teams defining policies and assigning roles like “data steward” (which no one wanted to be!) to people in the organisation and instead delegating those responsibilities to those teams and domains who produce the data and have the most context on the data.

I’m writing this on the train back from Paris, having spent the last few days at the apidays conference, where I gave a talk titled “Data contracts: The API for Data”. I have a lot of digest and plenty of notes to go through! But one think that struck me is the similarities between software and data.

I had a really great chat last week with Juan and Tim on their Catalog & Cocktails podcast. They were both so interested in the topic and asked really great questions, and I think we did their “no BS” tagline justice!

I get asked a lot if there is, or should be, a standard for a data contract. My answer has always been that a successful standard could be valuable and potentially unlock a lot of innovation.

Yali Sassoon wrote a great article about What is, and what isn’t, a data contract. It’s quite timely as data contracts is becoming one of those terms that can mean whatever you want it to mean, like data governance or (possibly) data mesh.

I’m so proud to announce that my book on data contracts is out now! Available wherever you buy your books, including Amazon, Packt, ebooks.com, Kobo and through the O’Reilly learning platform.

With the release of my book on data contracts, I wanted to share why I agreed to write this book, and what it means to me personally.

What do software engineers think about data contracts? 🤔

When talking about data contracts, we naturally focus on the benefits for our data teams, and how by improving the reliability and quality of our data we can drive significant business value from the data.

Really enjoyed talking about how we’re driving ML data quality with Data Contracts at a recent MLOps Community meetup!