What's a data contract?

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.

Some are using a “data contract” as another way for data engineers to define checks on the data once it has landed in the data warehouse, just as they already do using tools like Great Expectations and Soda.

But that’s doing nothing to improve the quality of the data, which is what was my original intention with data contracts.

To do that you need to shift things further left, as the only place you can improve data quality is at the source.

You need those generating the data to be providing quality data that meets the expectations they set - expectations that meet the requirements of the consumers of the data. Those expectations are then captured in a data contract.

For more on how to do all of this with data contracts check out my book on data quality and data contracts.