Data Mesh

Chapter 13. Design Discovering, Understanding, and Composing Data

Discovering, understanding, and trusting data is a necessary step of data journeys. What makes data mesh’s approach unique is how to discover, understand, and trust data in a decentralized mesh of interconnected and autonomous data products, without creating centralized bottlenecks.

Similarly, composing new data from intersections and aggregations of multiple existing data is a basic function necessary for all data work. Data mesh introduces the ability to compose multiple data products in a decentralized fashion without creating tightly coupled data models that become bottlenecks for change.

This chapter introduces each affordance of data discoverability and composability briefly. I describe data mesh’s position and introduce the design considerations so that each individual data product plays a part, locally, in its discoverability, understandability, and composability. I discuss how these local affordances of a data product surface mesh-level capabilities across many data products without creating tightly coupled synchronization points.

This chapter describes the boundaries of a data mesh approach, what is compatible with the objectives of data mesh, and what is not. The exact specifications are yet to be defined and tested and are outside of the scope of this book.

Discover, Understand, Trust, and Explore

Data mesh defines discoverability, understandability, trustworthiness, and explorability as some of the ...