Introducing the principles of a contract-driven data architecture
Building a contract-driven data architecture provides many benefits to both the data generators and consumers, and the wider organization. These benefits are achieved through these three principles:
- Automation
- Guidelines and guardrails
- Consistency
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Automation
There are several common tasks that need to be carried out on the data and the resources we use to manage it, no matter what that data is and who owns it. These tasks are great candidates to automate, reducing the effort the data generators need to spend managing the data.
The resources required for our data will almost always include the tables in the data warehouse. We can use the data contract to automate the creation and management of that table, for example, by creating the table when the contract is created and keeping the schema of the table in sync with the schema in the contract...
