Glossary

Data Contract

A data contract is an explicit agreement between a data producer and its consumers: the schema that will be delivered, what the fields mean, the quality and freshness guarantees, and how changes will be communicated and versioned. Ideally it’s machine-readable and enforced in CI — a producer can’t merge a change that breaks a promise a consumer depends on.

Contracts exist because the implicit alternative — downstream teams discovering schema changes when dashboards break — makes every producer change everyone else’s incident. The technology is the easy part; the hard part is organisational: contracts only hold when producers accept ownership of what they publish, which is a cultural change wearing a YAML file.

Go deeper: Data Contracts Are a Cultural Problem