In this third episode of Actian Explained I dive into Data Products and Data Contracts, that are absolutely core to our data intelligence platform. Below the video in this post I briefly discuss the idea of shift left and how it at can make you achieve great things with data - through data products and data contracts.
Shift Left - A new way of doing data management
Shifting left is a movement in the data community that builds on the potential of data contracts. And the idea of data contracts is not new: I personally discovered the concept in the first edition of Piethein Strengholt’s book Data Management at Scale, now out in the second edition.[1] Later followed the first book dedicated to data contracts, by Andrew Jones, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts.[2] I recently interviewed Andrew Jones on my podcast Enterprise Wide Search that I co-host with Emma McGrattan.
Data contracts do not necessarily rely on data products, although the two are a powerful combination. We believe these two concepts belong together naturally in our data intelligence platform, exactly because this setup will allow you to shift left with maximum effect.
OK - so what is shift left? The idea of shifting left for data is inspired by software engineering (like so many other aspects of data engineering). Just like you don’t deploy code from dev to prod before testing it, you should specify everything about the usage of data up front, in a data contract - you shift left. This saves you substantial time as you can reduce the task of performing data governance and engineering upstream. This movement is so powerful it can change how companies work with data, especially because it is also very simple and easy to implement.[3] You can see this depicted in the below diagram:
Shifting left can be performed in a really radical way, and we intend to do that with the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, with features that are soon to be released.
References
[1] P. Strengholt, Data Management at Scale, (O’Reilly, 2024
[2] A. Jones, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, (Packt, 2023)
[3] And shifting left also allow you to shift right, as Joe Reis discusses in The Convergence - Shifting Left AND Right.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform empowers your AI strategy with enterprise-grade data governance and AI-ready data products. By enabling data contracts and product-centric design through built-in left-shift methodologies, we help you accelerate innovation with confidence.