Data Contracts

Chapter 6. The Data Contract Components: Detection and Prevention

In Chapter 5, we provided an overview of the data contract components and discussed in detail the role of data assets and contract definitions within the data contract architecture pattern. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of all the architecture components and then spend subsequent sections focusing on the detection and prevention components of data contracts. By the end of this chapter, you will have a solid foundation of what you need in order to implement the data contract architecture—which we will do through a guided coding project in Chapter 7.

Recall from Chapter 5 that data contract architecture requires using a toolbox of infrastructure, with each component broken up into four main categories and their respective subcategories (you can refer back to Figure 5-1 for a visual representation):

Data assets

The foundation of all data infrastructure is databases, and while the range of databases is vast, we will focus on the following four categories for this book:

• Analytics databases

• Transactional databases

• Event sourcing and event streams

• First-party data, third-party platform

Contract definition

The surface to embed the expectations around schema and business logic (i.e., semantics) for a respective data asset, which is then compared to centralized sources of metadata. The three components are as follows:

• Data contract spec

• Business logic

• Schema registry and data catalogs