Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts: A comprehensive guide to building reliable, trusted, and effective data platforms

Everything you need to know to apply data contracts and build a truly data-driven organization that harnesses quality data to deliver tangible business value

Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Key Features

• Understand data contracts and their power to resolving the problems in contemporary data platforms
• Learn how to design and implement a cutting-edge data platform powered by data contracts
• Access practical guidance from the pioneer of data contracts to get expert insights on effective utilization

Book Description

Despite the passage of time and the evolution of technology and architecture, the challenges we face in building data platforms persist. Our data often remains unreliable, lacks trust, and fails to deliver the promised value.

With Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, you'll discover the potential of data contracts to transform how you build your data platforms, finally overcoming these enduring problems. You'll learn how establishing contracts as the interface allows you to explicitly assign responsibility and accountability of the data to those who know it best'the data generators'and give them the autonomy to generate and manage data as required. The book will show you how data contracts ensure that consumers get quality data with clearly defined expectations, enabling them to build on that data with confidence to deliver valuable analytics, performant ML models, and trusted data-driven products.

By the end of this book, you'll have gained a comprehensive understanding of how data contracts can revolutionize your organization's data culture and provide a competitive advantage by unlocking the real value within your data.

What you will learn

• Gain insights into the intricacies and shortcomings of today's data architectures
• Understand exactly how data contracts can solve prevalent data challenges
• Drive a fundamental transformation of your data culture by implementing data contracts
• Discover what goes into a data contract and why it's important
• Design a modern data architecture that leverages the power of data contracts
• Explore sample implementations to get practical knowledge of using data contracts
• Embrace best practices for the successful deployment of data contracts

Who this book is for

If you're a data engineer, data leader, architect, or practitioner thinking about your data architecture and looking to design one that enables your organization to get the most value from your data, this book is for you. Additionally, staff engineers, product managers, and software engineering leaders and executives will also find valuable insights.

Table of Contents

1. A Brief History of Data Platforms
2. Introducing Data Contracts
3. How to Get Adoption in Your Organization
4. Bringing Data Consumers and Generators Closer Together
5. Embedding Data Governance
6. What Makes Up a Data Contract
7. A Contract-Driven Data Architecture
8. A Sample Implementation
9. Implementing Data Contracts In Your Organization
10. Data Contracts in Practice

Andrew Jones is a principal engineer at GoCardless, one of Europe’s leading Fintech's. He has over 15 years experience in the industry, with the first half primarily as a software engineer, before he moved into the data infrastructure and data engineering space. Joining GoCardless as its first data engineer, he led his team to build their data platform from scratch. After initially following a typical data architecture and getting frustrated with facing the same old challenges he’d faced for years, he started thinking there must be a better way, which led to him coining and defining the ideas around data contracts. Andrew is a regular speaker and writer, and he is passionate about helping organizations get maximum value from data.