Daily data contracts tips

What does it mean when we say data producers must take responsibility for their data?

Ben Watson at Nandos, a South African restaurant chain operating in 30 countries, has a great write up on their modern data platform with data mesh and data contracts.

I was at Confluent’s Data In Motion event in London yesterday and this quote by Tim Berglund in they keynote caught my attention:

When you start your adoption of data contracts, you want to start with the most critical datasets, because this is where you can add the most value.

When a schema change is made in a data contract you might want to think about how you can automate the deployment of that and migration to it, without data loss or effort from the consumers.

What is the problem you’re trying to solve with data contracts?

Is it:

• Improve the governance and control of your data?
• Reduce the amount of preventable data incidents?
• Move towards a more decentralised operational model?

And how does solving that problem help the business achieve its goals?

The problem with using data isn’t usually finding it - data catalogs can surface that data.

I was giving a talk a few weeks ago on data contracts, and through it one audience member seemed particularly engaged, nodding along throughout.

Many data engineering teams spend a lot of their time struggling to deal with upstream data. That includes:

Following on from yesterday’s note on the API Mandate and data contracts, I wan’t to be clear you don’t need to mandate data contracts to get adoption.