The word semantic is rather heavily used (often incorrectly) when discussing data models. The word semantic itself is an adjective relating to meaning in language or logic. When we think about its use in data models, we think of the…
Iceberg has gained a huge amount of popularity in recent years, but why is this table format now finding such widespread adoption? There are a number of reasons and I shall attempt to explain them in this post. Before Iceberg,…
Not going to win any awards for this blog post title. But keys really are a critical part of a database design and are often misunderstood, ignored and used in the wrong way. Keys are just attributes like everything other…
If you’ve ever queried a database with SQL (Structured Query Language) then you’ve been standing on the mathematical shoulders of Georg Cantor. His 19th-century work on set theory laid the conceptual foundation that later revolutionised how we store and retrieve…
Not a Wu-Tang Clan song. This is about Data Quality. Every organization claims to want high-quality data, but when pressed to define what that means, the conversation becomes vague. They was “clean data” or “accurate data” or “reliable data” –…
Honestly, we will do the conceptual and logical models later. Well, maybe. Probably. Yeah, we won’t. Data modelling is an art, but not everyone is an artist. We entust this highly specialised domain to engineers with (sometimes) little training and…
In the late 1960s, Edgar F. Codd, an Oxford-educated mathematician working at IBM’s research lab in San Jose looked at the way data was being stored and thought “…this is far too messy” (probably). Back then, data lived in hierarchical…
Ask five different systems in your organization for information about customer number 12345, and you’ll likely get five different answers. The CRM shows one address, the order management system shows another, billing has a third, and the data warehouse has…
I only recently discovered this pattern for data model design. If you’ve heard of the centipede schema previously, then it’s probably as a warning rather than a recommendation. This rare dimensional modeling pattern represents what happens when the normalization philosophy…
Most introductions to dimensional modeling start with the star schema – a single fact table surrounded by dimensions. It’s clean, simple, and perfect for explaining the basics. But real businesses are rarely that simple and you can model from a…
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