Data Contract - CI/CD Glossary Definition

A data contract is a versioned agreement defining a datasets schema, semantics, and quality so producers cannot silently break consumers.

A data contract is an explicit, versioned agreement between a data producer and consumer specifying the schema, semantics, and quality guarantees of a dataset. Breaking it fails CI.

Data contracts move schema agreements into code, checked automatically so a producer change that breaks a consumer is caught at build time.

Enforced in CI

A contract is a machine-readable spec (often YAML or JSON Schema). CI diffs a producers output against the contract and blocks the merge on a breaking change.

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