Treat a Feature Store as a Contract, Not a Table
Identify the minimum contract fields that make a feature safe to reuse.
The registry entry is the promise; the table is only evidence. Contract Before Reuse A feature store reduces duplicate feature engineering only when feature definitions carry operational meaning. The minimum contract is not large: entity key, event timestamp, schema, transformation owner, freshness target, null behavior, online/offline availability, and intended use. These fields prevent teams from treating a value as portable when it was designed for one notebook. Why The Contract Works Feature consumers make decisions at different times. Training retrieval asks what was true at a historical event. Online serving asks what is true enough right now. Batch scoring asks…
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