Data Contracts

Happy new year everyone! If you had a break over the holidays I hope you had a good one.

A couple of months ago the team at Notion published a great post titled a brief history of Notion’s data catalog.

The initial idea for data contracts was to create an interface through which reliable and well-structured data could be made available to consumers. Like an API, but for data.

Welcome to my new and improved newsletter! I’ll be publishing in this new format weekly on Friday mornings, discussing how to implement data mesh, data products and data contracts. I hope you enjoy it, but as always you can unsubscribe at any time.

Following on from yesterdays post, perhaps the key point is to make the impact of data issues visible.

Yesterday I talked to software engineers about data quality.

It went well!

Specifically, it was about the responsibilities they have, as data producers, when they migrate a data contract to a new version.

Miro recently wrote up their adoption of data contracts in Data Products Reliability: The Power of Metadata.

Barr Moses, Co-Founder & CEO at Monte Carlo, posted some interesting data on data incidents on LinkedIn.

Some people argue data contracts won’t work in their organisation.

When asked why, the most common response is “our data producers wouldn’t accept it”.

Traditionally, data governance has been implemented using people and processes.

You establish standards. Define roles. Encourage greater communication.