AI engineering glossary · Data engineering
What is data contract?
Data contract: A formal, versioned agreement between the producer of a dataset and its consumers that specifies schema, meaning, quality expectations and delivery terms. Enforcing it turns unexpected upstream changes into visible failures instead of silent breakage.
Data contract: an example
The orders team promises a table with fixed columns and daily refresh by 6 a.m.; a change that drops a column fails the contract check in review.
Related terms
More Data engineering terms
- Data federation
- Data freshness
- Data governance
- Data ingestion
- Data lake
- Data lakehouse
- Data lineage
- Data mart
Where you learn it
Data contract is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.