Data contracts and Airbyte: A partnership for maintaining data consistency

Data contracts are an agreement between data producers (software engineers) and data consumers (data or analytics teams), setting expectations about the data. They help maintain consistency and prevent unexpected breakages in data pipelines, especially during ingestion. Key aspects of data contracts include defining data types and ingestion frequency. Modern data stack tools like Airbyte assist with managing changing schemas and maintaining contracts between data and software engineers. dbt also offers a data contracts feature to ensure data is being ingested as specified before models are built, promoting proactive practices in data management.