Interfaces

Data contacts has always been about solving the problem of tightly coupled data integrations.

In fact, my first public post on data contracts back in 2021 was all about replacing a tightly coupled data integration (change data capture) with data contracts.

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.

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

You establish standards. Define roles. Encourage greater communication.

Responding to yesterdays post on LinkedIn, Anna Bergevin wrote:

I agree and interface makes things less tightly coupled. But in order to change this we’d need a big cultural change at the company to seeing publishing data for secondary use cases as a core function of the job. Part of why data teams go in and get the data vs the other team publishing an API is because it’s the data team’s whole job to make data available and takes minimal effort from the software/system team. If the team is expected to make and maintain an API (including change management) that is a LOT of extra work. […]

I came across this on LinkedIn (as a screenshot from Bluesky) this morning.

Good software teams change their database schemas all the time, to add features, improve performance, fix bugs, and so on.