Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger
the agreement says this table is never more than three hours behind, so a four-hour delay is a breach rather than an opinion.
Freshness SLA
Also calleddata SLA, freshness target
A stated commitment about how current a dataset will be, agreed with the people who depend on it. Its value is that it converts an unbounded expectation into a number that can be measured, alerted on and occasionally renegotiated. Without one, every delay is a conversation from first principles, and the pipeline team ends up defending latency numbers nobody ever agreed to.