Data Contracts in Action: Tools
To address these questions, let’s first take a step back and explore the potential use cases for data contracts. Once we understand their applications, we can dive into the tools that support them.
When you use data contracts as your source of truth, all the previously mentioned use cases become standardised patterns across your data pipelines. By adopting a contract-first approach, you ensure that every aspect of your data pipeline is captured within the data contract. Any change to the pipeline, whether it’s related to schema, security, stakeholders, physical location (e.g., data stored in a specific Postgres table), data quality, SLAs, or other elements, must go through the data contract.
Another key advantage of a contract-first approach is that it abstracts your data infrastructure from specific technologies. Whether you’re using a particular database, cloud provider, file format, message format, ETL tool, orchestrator, or data catalog, you can generate the necessary artifacts directly from the data defined in the data contract.
