What good data owes you
When you build on someone else’s data, you inherit their promises. Every field becomes a dependency. Every gap becomes your gap, and every stale value becomes your bug. Choosing a data platform is closer to choosing a foundation than choosing a vendor.
So we think a data platform owes its users four things.
- Coverage. Missing data fails silently. No error is thrown when the source you never ingested says something that matters. A platform owes you the whole slice of the record it claims, not the convenient parts.
- Freshness. Stale data does not look stale. It arrives with the same confidence as the truth and is wrong anyway. Currency should be measured in minutes and treated as a feature, not a footnote.
- Structure. The same fact should arrive in the same shape every time, from every source. If two records disagree about what a field means, the platform has exported its confusion to you.
- Access. An interface should be simple to adopt on the first afternoon and hard to outgrow years later. Complexity that saves the provider effort by costing every user effort is debt passed downstream.
There is a fifth debt that keeps the other four honest: a platform should tell you what it does not know. Which sources are not covered, how old a value is, where confidence is low. An empty field is respectable. A quietly wrong one is not.
This is the standard we hold every Relative company to, and the bar anything must clear before it joins.