Who consumes the data contract?

The data contract is consumed by data teams who are looking for data to build their data products and by the pipeline managers who are consuming data based on the contract.

The users typically look at the contract to ensure that the data has the quality and reliability they need for their project. Once they decide to use this data, they typically build the code to consume this data. This could be a pipeline that pulls data from this source and lands it in their landing zone or it could be direct access to this data source through memory data frames, such as Python code running in a notebook. Irrespective of this, they should first confirm that the data contract has not changed and that the schema and the version are still valid. Figure 8.1 is a simple version of how a contract can be maintained and consumed:

Figure 8.1 – Maintaining data contracts

In reality, it might be more complex than that. Depending on how...