Data Contract
A data contract is a formal, versioned agreement between a data producer (back-end team, source application) and its consumers (data engineers, analytics, ML) that describes the schema, semantics, SLAs and quality rules…
A [data](/ressources/glossaire-de-la-tech/data-donnee) contract is a formal, versioned agreement between a data producer (back-end team, source application) and its consumers (data engineers, analytics, ML) that describes the schema, semantics, SLAs and quality rules of the data being exchanged.
The data contract documents fields, types, allowed values, update frequency, acceptable latency and policies for breaking changes. It serves as the source of truth for validating data at production and consumption time, putting an end to silent regressions that break analytics pipelines.
It is a pillar of modern data architectures (data mesh in particular), often implemented with tools such as Soda, Great Expectations, Datacontract.com, or directly in the Kafka schema registry.