What Is Data Modeling / Data Analytics & What are It’s Benefits

Today in this blog, we will discuss about data modelling, why it’s important to leverage, and the different kinds of data models you can create for your business to stand out over your competitors. As we all know, in present world of technology, any kind of information or data is a valuable resource. As time goes on, more and more bits of information are being created on a daily basis. In a lack of robust data engineering technology, your business model can experience lengthy delays, lost productivity, frustrated customers, and damaged business relationships.

Proper data management and data modeling have a significant impact on business growth as they can help companies improve information that can give them an edge over their competitors. Data modeling is the most important step in any analytical project. Data models are used to create databases, manage data for analytical processing, and implement applications that enable users to access information in meaningful ways. Data modeling is a process that you use to define the data structure of a database. In other words, it’s a technique that you can use to create a database from scratch. This could be for a simple database where you’re storing information about customers and products. In a simple words we can say “Data modeling is the process of transforming data into information.”

Any information is useless unless delivered in a format that can be consumed by business users. And data modeling helps in translating the requirements of business users into a data model that can be used to support business processes and scale analytics. Data modeling is an important stage of any software project because, without it, you cannot get a clear idea of what your database should look like and how your application will be built upon it. Data modeling allows you to identify the possible relationships between different pieces of information, which will determine what type of queries can be run against that data.

Benefits Of Data Modeling or Data Analytics

Helps To Create Higher Quality Applications
The most important benefit of data modeling is that it produces higher-quality applications, which are less likely to crash and easier for you to maintain. If you are not applying data modeling methods then you are lacking your business growth. Data modeling helps to generate new & higher growth oriented applications. It doesn’t matter if your organization is big or small. If your application is written without any structured code, the result is worse. And if you ever need to change it or add new features, all of your code will be a tangled mess.

Reduced Cost & minimal Time of Application Development
Data modeling has a huge impact on the cost and time it takes to build a new application. If your team does not have a data model, you will need to spend time gathering requirements from users and hand-coding the database structure. If you do have a data model, it is much easier to add new tables and views because you can add them directly to your data model. While building an application, if you find that you need to add a table or modify an existing table, you can simply add it to your data model and update the existing application. If you don’t have a data model, then your team will need to update both the database and the code. This can be very time-consuming and expensive if you need to make multiple changes across the entire application.

Early Detection of Data Errors
In many cases, data issues and errors are not discovered until the process is running. For example, a user might go to make a purchase and get an error message saying “bad data.” In this scenario, the data was bad from the start. You can test it in a lab or on a test server, but you don’t discover the errors until the process is actually running in production. The earlier you discover a problem with your data, the more time you have to correct it before it negatively impacts your users. Many companies use a Data Modeling approach because it builds an accurate view of how your users interact with your business – down to details like which fields they access and how often they use them. This level of insight provides critical information about where problems exist and how best to employ corrections. By conducting regular Data Model Audits, you can ensure that your data model is continuously optimized for your users and their goals.

Higher Performance Applications
Data modeling isn’t just about saving money. That’s important, of course, but the real value of data modeling is that it makes your application run faster and more efficiently. Data modeling is key to the performance of an application because it provides a high-level plan for how the application should handle data. This means that developers know what kind of data to expect and how it will be used and where in memory each piece of information will be stored. This means that they can write functions to retrieve data quickly and easily. This is very different from just using tables to store data in an unorganized manner. By using unstructured tables, developers would have to spend time writing complex SQL queries that may or may not return what they’re looking for. By using structured tables, the database engine will already know how to find the information—and developers won’t have to worry about it.

Better Documentation
Data models help to define the business processes and their interrelationships. If all the data related to a business process is defined in a single place, it becomes easy to understand and maintain those processes long-term. Data modeling also helps in documenting the business requirements and design of the application. The requirements and design can be better communicated if there is a single source for them. Also, changes that occur due to new requirements, enhancements, or bug fixes can be easily identified and implemented.

Types of Data Models

Conceptual Data Model
Conceptual data models are the foundation of every data model that’s created. They help you understand which entities exist in your business and how they relate to each other. Conceptual models don’t include the details regarding the specific attributes attached to an entity. A conceptual model is a diagram that describes what your business does and how things work together. It’s a hierarchical view of entities and their relationships, and it’s usually created to give stakeholders a broad overview of the database. Data modeling tools can help you create a conceptual model for your database in no time at all.

Logical Data Model
Logical Data Model focuses on how data is stored in an organization’s systems. The logical model describes how data moves between its source (system) and its destination (database). It uses entities, attributes, relationships, cardinality, and constraints to describe the entity set for each table in a relational database. The logical data model provides the foundation for creating physical data models. These can be used to define tables in relational databases or objects in object-oriented languages such as SQL, Java, or C++.

Physical Data Model
Physical data modeling is the process of defining the structure of a database store information. The physical model is typically created by a database administrator or system analyst. It is used to create tables, indexes, and views, which are implemented through the use of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements. The simplest form of data modeling involves creating models that describe how data should be stored in tables. These models are then implemented into one or more databases. A more complex form of data modeling involves creating a logical model that describes how data will be accessed and manipulated by end-users and applications that consume it.

Types of Data Modeling

Data modeling is a diagram of the logical structure of data within a database & it can help people understand data in a better way. The most common types of data modeling are hierarchical, relational, entity-relationship, object-oriented, and dimensional data models.

Hierarchical Data Model
A hierarchical data model is a structure for organizing data into a tree-like hierarchy, otherwise known as a parent-child relationship. In a hierarchical data model, each record is uniquely identified by a key, which is the same value for every record at the same level in the hierarchy. A typical example is a sales order: it has many sales items, but each sales item can be associated with only one sales order. The sales order is the parent entity, and the sales item is the child entity.

Relational Data Model
A relational model contains nodes that are related to each other through links that contain relational data. These models are commonly used to create databases for storing and retrieving information quickly and easily. The idea behind relational databases is to store all types of data in one table, as long as each column represents a unique piece of information about the entity. A simple example would be a table for storing information about people. The table would have columns for the first name, last name, social security number, birth date, etc.

Entity-relationship Data Model
The Entity-relationship (ER) model is a method of representing your data in an organized way. The ER model breaks the data down into the following categories:

Entities: The objects, actions, or concepts that you are working with. For example, customers, products, and sales are all entities.

Relationships: The connections between entities. These can be one-to-one or one-to-many relationships.

Attributes: Data that describes an entity or relationship. For example, the name of a product is an attribute of that product.

In order to create a solid ER model, you need to have a clear, detailed understanding of your business processes and information requirements for your users.

Object-oriented Data Model
An object-oriented data model is a conceptual data model that uses objects to describe and define information. This is in contrast to an entity-relationship model, which describes information as entities linked by relationships. Objects are real-world items that are made up of several attributes. For example, customers have names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. If the data modeler were to use an entity-relationship model to describe these customers, these attributes would be stored in separate tables, with associations defined between the tables.

Dimensional Data Model
Dimensional data models are the foundation of business intelligence (BI) and online analytical processing (OLAP) systems. These models are typically implemented for data warehouses containing historical transactional data but can also be applied to smaller data sets. Dimensional data models often reference multiple structures that include fact tables, dimension tables, and lookup tables. Dimensional modeling is the basis for creating enterprise data warehouses (EDW) and online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

The purpose of the data modeling process is to define and document how your business information should be modeled within the enterprise data architecture.

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