Introducing Data Contracts: Collect Events Correctly the First Time

Data contracts are in equal parts a code-driven feature (as a system that enforces data governance) as they are a cultural change (as a system that creates collaboration between data producers and consumers). They have become a mainstream tactic in many modern data tools–as part of the core product strategy at industry giants like Monte Carlo and dbt and in dedicated startups like Gable.Ai.

The goal of data contracts is to improve collaboration between data producers and data consumers, bridging a visibility gap that has caused decades' worth of data quality issues at all levels of the stack. Contracts bring version control and change management to the data space, resulting in visibility, awareness, and the prevention of breaking changes through human-in-the-loop review and conversation. Those conversations bring awareness to how upstream data is being used downstream, its importance, and its impact on the business.

Chad Sanderson

CEO

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Gable.AI

Data Contracts in Hightouch Events

Hightouch Events allows companies to easily collect and load events into the warehouse to support analytics and the Composable CDP. We built a user-friendly data contracts feature directly into Hightouch Events so that data and engineering teams can enforce data quality for behavioral events collected on websites and apps.

Hightouch Events’ data contracts have several key features that make it easy to enforce data quality:

• Highly-accessible interface. We built a simple visual interface that makes it easy for anyone to define new data contracts and understand existing ones created by other team members.
• Violation quarantine and write back. When data violates contracts, we write it to a dedicated separate warehouse table. This allows teams to easily find and debug errors and then replay corrected data into their main behavioral event tables.
• Programmatic management. Technical teams can manage data contracts at scale and programmatically via both Git and APIs.
• Debug mode. Debug mode allows engineers to proactively test code changes to see if they introduce event data violations.
• Violation alerting. It’s easy to set up alerts for different types of data violations to Slack and whatever other tools you use to manage internal communications.

Here’s a demo of Hightouch Events’ data contracts in action:

Getting Started

Hightouch Events allows companies to easily collect behavioral data on their website or app and store it in the warehouse. We’ve built features like data contracts to ensure that this data is high quality and ready for your production use cases. Traditional CDPs charge extra for their data quality features, meaning you either have to settle for messy data or pay a premium to clean it up later. Hightouch Events is built for the modern data team and includes Data Contracts out of the box. To get a demo of Hightouch Events and see if it’s right for your organization, reach out to us today.