Data contracts primer

Owners + targets without enterprise theater.

The problem

Contracts die when they’re 40-page PDFs. They live when a table has an owner and an hour target.

The outcome

Treat contracts as operable freshness (and later schema) expectations wired into monitoring.

Contract

Owner + target

Enforcement

Monitoring

Anti-pattern

Wiki only

What you get

Less is more.

Unmonitored contracts are fiction.

Don’t invent a governance platform on day one.

Breadth comes after calm works.

Learn · Reliability

Data freshness monitoring

How to know a table went quiet before a dashboard lies.

Learn · BigQuery

BigQuery table freshness

Using last-modified metadata as an SLA signal.

Learn · Reliability

Stale dashboard detection

Catching wrong numbers that still render fine.

Open workspace, or book a Data Stack Health Audit credited toward Managed.