Data contracts have been much discussed in the community of late, with a lot of curiosity around how to approach this concept in practice and how it might enable shift-left developer-first governance and data quality. For organizations adopting dbt while also dealing with non-dbt data that is upstream of the warehouse, it can be challenging to understand how to apply data contracts uniformly across a fragmented stack. We are calling this harmonizing layer the Control Plane for Data - powered by the common thread across these systems: metadata.

In this talk, Shirshanka Das, CTO of Acryl Data and founder of the DataHub Project describes how you can use data contracts and DataHub to make your dbt centered stack more reliable - as well as other use cases that can help build a simpler, more flexible data stack.

Speaker: Shirshanka Das, CTO, Acryl Data

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Data contracts have been much discussed in the community of late, with a lot of curiosity around how to approach this concept in practice. We believe data contracts need a harmonizing layer to manage data quality in a uniform manner across a fragmented stack. We are calling this harmonizing layer the Control Plane for Data - powered by the common thread across these systems: metadata. For teams already orchestrating pipelines with Airflow, data contacts can be an effective way to process data that meets preset quality standards. With a control plane as a connecting layer, producers can build data contracts that consumers can rely on, ensuring DAGs only run when a contract is valid. Producers can govern how workflows should behave, and consumers receive the tooling they need to only opt into high quality data. Learn how to use data contracts and DataHub to make your Airflow pipelines more reliable - as well as other use cases that can help build a simpler, more flexible data stack.

ABOUT THE TALK: This talk explains what the control plane of data looks like and how it fits into the reference architecture for the deconstructed data stack: a data stack that includes operational data stores, streaming systems, transformation engines, BI tools, warehouses, ML tools and orchestrators.

It dives into the fundamental characteristics for a control plane:

Breadth (completeness) Latency (freshness) Scale Source of Truth Auditability

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Shirshanka Das is the Co-founder and CEO of Acryl Data, the company which is commercializing the open source DataHub project, a real-time metadata platform used by LinkedIn, Stripe, Pinterest, Optum, Expedia and many others. Prior to founding Acryl, he was the overall architect for Big Data at LinkedIn from 2010 to 2020, and responsible for creating the metadata and data management strategy at the company.

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Summary The binding element of all data work is the metadata graph that is generated by all of the workflows that produce the assets used by teams across the organization. The DataHub project was created as a way to bring order to the scale of LinkedIn’s data needs. It was also designed to be able to work for small scale systems that are just starting to develop in complexity. In order to support the project and make it even easier to use for organizations of every size Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish founded Acryl Data. In this episode they discuss the recent work that has been done by the community, how their work is building on top of that foundation, and how you can get started with DataHub for your own work to manage data discovery today. They also share their ambitions for the near future of adding data observability and data quality management features.

Announcements

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Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Acryl Data is and the story behind it? How has your experience of building and running DataHub at LinkedIn informed your product direction for Acryl?

What are some lessons that your co-founder Swaroop has contributed from his experience at AirBnB?

The data catalog/discovery/quality market has become very active over the past year. What is your perspective on the market, and what are the gaps that are not yet bei