## Metadata * URL: [https://dataproducts.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-data-contracts](https://dataproducts.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-data-contracts) * Published Date: 2022-08-22 * Author: [[Chad sanderson|Chad Sanderson]] ## Highlights * Today, engineers have almost no incentive to take ownership of the data quality they produce outside operational use cases. * If you talk to almost any SWE that is producing operational data which is also being used for business-critical analytics they will probably have no idea who the customers are for that data, how it's being used, and why it's important. * database schema as a non-consensual API. * Data Contracts are API-like agreements between Software Engineers who own services and Data Consumers that understand how the business works in order to generate well-modeled, high-quality, trusted, real-time data. * Contracts can be used to create an abstraction between operational data and other downstream consumers of data for analytical purposes.