The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: The Value of Data Contracts with Chad Sanderson, Head of Data, Data Contracts Advocate, Data Quality Camp

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Chad Sanderson of Data Quality Camp.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, Kostas, fascinating conversation with Chad Sanderson, who runs Data Quality Camp, which is a community. He produces a ton of content. And we covered so many topics. I think one of the things that he

kept returning to over and over again, I think was incredibly helpful and just a really good... There's so much practical stuff for people to get from the show. I felt like I could walk away from the show and have practical things that I could start doing tomorrow to make data quality better. And I think that was really refreshing because the conversation around data quality can feel really big, right? It's a huge problem. How do you fix it? We have so much tech debt. What tools do I use? Where do you solve the problem in the pipeline? Do you try to do things proactively with schema management? Do you try to do sort of passive detection? I mean, there's so many things. And I walked away, especially at the end there, by even having a couple of practical things in my mind of like, I should probably go do this tomorrow to make our data quality better.

There are small things that I can do. leaders, but also the ones who are doing the work on the ground every day. Just a hugely practical, helpful episode in terms of what can you do tomorrow to start improving data quality. We also talked about philosophy, which is always fun. Absolutely. What I'll keep from the conversation that we had with Chad and I found very refreshing and interesting is that he's giving a definition of what data quantity is from the perspective of, let's say, the agents that are involved in the process of working with data and not trying to give like an objective definition of, oh, you have like this metric and that metric and like something that's, you know, automatically like a machine can reason about. Right.

And I think like that's like the most important thing here. But at the end, no matter what, data is like information and we have to agree on how we use it. And that's like, I think like the big change that Chad brings with his ideas. And the most interesting thing is that he's not keeping it abstract. It's not like, it's not like an abstract paradigm, but like an organization. It's like, you know, to go and like hire hundreds of consultants like to coach you on how like to do it's he tells you that like you can do it today like the tooling is out there and he positions technology in a very interesting way on what's the role of the technology like

making this happen so i don't know i think i I should encourage everyone to listen and re-listen these episodes, because I think there's a lot of wisdom in the things that we discussed, both in terms of technology and how it can be used, but also the importance of people in the organization implementing processes around data. I agree. Well, thank you again for joining the Data Sack Show. We will catch you on the next one.