Universal Data Modeling

Chapter 1. Introduction to Data Modelling

A note for Early Release readers

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As its title suggests, this book discusses the theory and practice of data modeling. If you work as a data professional—such as a data architect, data engineer, data scientist, data analyst, or alike—you’ve probably stumbled into the world of data modeling at some point in your professional life. You may have heard about it in college or early in your career, along with a bunch of difficult theories and concepts. Unfortunately, most of those theories and concepts are detached from the real work you do day-to-day. Data modeling too may have become a remote memory, like Newton’s laws. As fundamental as those are, you can happily live without remembering them, right?

But as you move up the corporate ladder, there eventually will be a need to look at your systems from a broader, higher, more systematic perspective. And the more senior you get, the bigger your scope of responsibility becomes. Data scientists will need to read data from more datasets to feed more artificial ...