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Data Contracts
What is a Data Contract?
A data contract is a metadata-defined agreement between data producers and data consumers. It codifies expectations such as schema, data types, constraints, SLAs, and data quality (DQ) rules—ensuring consistency and compliance before data is written into downstream systems.
What Does "Shift Left" Mean?
"Shift Left" in data engineering means pushing testing, validation, and governance earlier in the data pipeline—at the ingestion or ETL stage rather than downstream in warehouses or reporting layers. This approach minimizes rework, improves data trust, and accelerates analytics delivery.
Anyone who was a DBA in the 90's-200' implemented their ETL to be metadata driven, data contracts are essentially very similar.
Why Shift Left with Data Contracts?
- ✔️ Catch data quality issues early — not downstream in your Data Lakes, Snowflake or Redshift
- ✔️ Enforce schema validation, SLAs, and business rules at ingestion
- ✔️ Reduce pipeline breakage and support burden
- ✔️ Build trust in your data products through automation
How Metadata Makes It Work
InfoLibrarian captures and enforces data contracts as metadata — defining schema, validation rules, SLAs, data quality expectations, ownership, and lineage from the start.
{
"urn": "urn:product:customer_orders",
"schema": {
"order_id": "string",
"customer_id": "string",
"order_date": "date",
"total": "decimal"
},
"constraints": {
"order_id": "required",
"total": ">= 0"
},
"dq_rules": {
"order_date": "must not be in future",
"customer_id": "must exist in customer table"
},
"sla": {
"availability": "99.9%",
"freshness": "daily by 8am"
},
"business_metadata": {
"domain": "Sales",
"description": "Captures all customer orders and revenue activity.",
"owner": "dataops-team@company.com",
"tags": ["revenue", "sales", "orders"]
}
}
Real Use Cases We Enable
- ✅ Preventing bad data loads in cloud data lakes and warehouses
- ✅ Automatically testing pipelines before deployment
- ✅ Enforcing compliance rules through metadata-driven policies
- ✅ Stewardhsip and Metadata Driven Data Products
- ✅ Enterprise Data Marketplace
- ✅ Data Contract Metadata Modeling, Definition and Storage and Management
Metadata-driven data contracts strengthen governance by linking APIs and schemas directly to your data catalog. Incorporating taxonomy structures into contract validation improves discoverability and enforces semantic consistency. These practices support data stewardship by assigning responsibility and traceability across producer-consumer workflows.
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Follow the links below to see how InfoLibrarian™ can help you to capture and manage enterprise metadata.
Expert Data Governance Consulting
Metadata Management Products