Building data products
As we discussed in Chapter 1, A Brief History of Data Platforms, most of the data made available to data teams is in tables and datasets extracted in raw form as is from source systems using an extract, load, transform (ELT) tool. That leads to unreliable and expensive data pipelines and the creation of a bottleneck where a central data engineering team effectively control access to any data of value.
With data contracts, we want to move away from thinking about the tables and datasets in the source system and instead start creating data products.
In the following sub-sections, we are going to cover the following:
- What is a data product?
- Adopting a data product mindset
- Designing a data product
What is a data product?
We introduced the concept of data products and the benefits of them in Chapter 2, Introducing Data Contracts. Let’s go into more detail about the concept and define exactly what a data product is.
A data...