Ship trusted data products. Fast.

A data product is a trustworthy, purpose-built dataset designed for sharing and reuse across teams and services. Actian empowers organizations to create consumable entities of data that enable teams to push forward fast through analytics, data apps, AI projects, and simple data sharing.

Key characteristics of data products:

• Self-Contained Entities: Include all components needed to process, store, and serve domain data for AI, analytical, or data-intensive use cases.
• Purpose-built for Consumers: Ready-to-use for intended audiences without requiring additional processing or transformation.
• Standardized Interfaces: Follow consistent patterns that ensure interoperability across the organization.
• Quality Assured: Built with comprehensive metadata, lineage information, and trust indicators.
• Governed and Discoverable: Enriched with documentation and published into enterprise marketplaces for easy discovery.

Data products form the foundation of scalable data management, shifting organizations away from large centralized solutions toward distributed, domain-oriented approaches that maintain enterprise-wide governance and discoverability.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables data products through the Studio App for comprehensive management and the Explorer App for intuitive discovery, creating a thriving data marketplace where teams can find, understand, and leverage trusted data assets.

A data contract is a formal agreement between data producers and data consumers that defines and enforces the functionality, manageability, and reliability of data products. Actian enables organizations to implement data contracts as the foundation for scalable data management that shifts quality and governance responsibilities to the source.

Data contracts serve as the output port for data products, establishing clear expectations about:

• Schema Structure: Field definitions, data types, and required vs. optional elements.
• Data Quality Standards: Validation rules, completeness requirements, and accuracy thresholds.
• Governance Policies: Security classifications, privacy requirements, and usage restrictions.
• Service Level Agreements: Availability guarantees, update frequencies, and performance metrics.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables data contracts through automated metadata management and a federated knowledge graph architecture that creates intelligent relationships between data assets.

Bitol is a Linux Foundation project creating open standards for data contracts and data products. ODCS (Open Data Contract Standard) defines the specific agreements between data producers and consumers, while ODPS (Open Data Product Specification) defines the components of an entire, business-ready data product. ODPS serves as a comprehensive framework that can incorporate ODCS-style contracts for detailed, executable agreements within a broader product definition.

A data product is a trustworthy, purpose-built dataset designed for sharing and reuse across teams, while the data contract serves as the formal agreement that defines how to make it reusable across an organization. Actian enables this relationship through the Platform’s federated architecture.

Data products in Actian provide:

• Immediate value to intended consumers through well-structured, high-quality datasets.
• Standardized interfaces that ensure consistency across the organization.
• Reusable building blocks that can be combined to create additional data products.
• Self-contained entities that include all components needed for processing and serving data.

Data contracts enable data products by:

• Capturing metadata that describes the product and follows it throughout its lifecycle.
• Establishing clear agreements that define how consumers can access and use the data.
• Providing governance boundaries that protect data integrity while enabling innovation.
• Creating accountability mechanisms that hold data producers responsible for quality.

Actian’s Studio App empowers data stewards to manage data products and contracts, while the Explorer App enables business users to discover and request access to these trusted data assets.

Data contracts act like quality control for information, catching issues at the source instead of discovering problems after they’ve spread throughout systems. Actian empowers proactive quality management through automated validation and monitoring.

Quality improvements with Actian Data Intelligence:

• Source-Level Validation: Contracts enforce quality rules before data enters downstream systems, preventing bad data from propagating.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Quality metrics and trust indicators appear directly in discovery experiences.
• Impact Analysis: Data lineage capabilities help teams understand quality dependencies across the ecosystem.

Trust-building mechanisms:

• Transparent Quality Scoring: Trust indicators display data reliability assessments during the discovery phase.
• Lineage Visibility: Complete data transformation tracking enables verification of accuracy and completeness.
• Governance Integration: Automated policy enforcement ensures compliance with organizational standards.
• Accountability Frameworks: Clear ownership assignment through data stewardship workflows.

Data contracts serve as the glue that maintains coherence when breaking centralized data monoliths into distributed, domain-oriented data products. Actian enables successful data mesh implementations through federated governance and automated data contract management.

Data mesh enablement with Actian Data Intelligence:

• Domain Autonomy: Teams gain independence in data product creation while maintaining enterprise-wide discoverability.
• Interoperability Standards: Contracts define clear SLA’s that enable seamless data product composition and reuse.
• Decentralized Ownership: Data producers take accountability for quality and reliability through enforceable agreements.

Technical implementation advantages:

• Polyglot Data Support: Different domains can use preferred technologies while maintaining contract compliance.
• Modular Platform Components: Loosely coupled architecture adapts to diverse domain requirements.
• Cross-Domain Discovery: Federated knowledge graph enables Google-like search across all data products.

Organizational transformation:

• Reduced Coordination Overhead: Clear contracts eliminate the need for extensive cross-team communication.
• Scalable Governance: Automated compliance checks scale with organizational growth.
• Innovation Acceleration: Teams focus on business value rather than data infrastructure management.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform transforms data mesh vision into an operational reality through intelligent automation and federated governance.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform automates data contract management through comprehensive metadata extraction and a federated knowledge graph architecture, enabling:

Automated discovery and synchronization:

• Built-in scanners automatically collect metadata from leading enterprise data sources, including Snowflake, Azure, AWS, Databricks, legacy databases, and more.
• Daily synchronization ensures contracts reflect current system states without manual intervention.
• Dedicated APIs enable automatic registration and updates of data products and contracts from CI/CD pipelines.

Intelligent classification and validation:

• AI-powered algorithms automatically categorize and tag data assets based on content analysis.
• Smart recommendations suggest business term classification and contract elements.
• Automated quality assessment integrates with existing data quality tools to display trust indicators.

Governance automation:

• Policy enforcement automatically applies governance rules across your data ecosystem.
• Automated data classification reduces manual tagging overhead.
• Audit trails track all contract changes and user interactions for compliance reporting.