Data Contracts in Action

Todd McLellan

In the world of data, we often talk about “data products” and “data as a service.” Sounds great, right? But here’s the dirty little secret: too often, data isn’t reliable. It’s like building a beautiful house on a shaky foundation.

Imagine you’re a data consumer — perhaps a business analyst creating a critical report, or a machine learning engineer building a predictive model. You pull data from a source, only for the schema to unexpectedly change, a column to go missing, or the data...