Chapter 2: Data Modeling and ETL

"Poor programmers care about code, and good programmers care about the data structure and the relationships between data."

— Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, on the importance of data modeling

In the previous chapter, we introduced the big data ecosystem, the use cases across different industry verticals that use this data, the common challenges that they all face, and their journey towards digitization. We also looked at the trends in compute and storage technologies along with cloud adoption that is paving the way to enable companies to be more data-driven.

Data platforms are continuously evolving to support business analytic use cases and speed to insights is critical for a business to remain relevant and competitive. Both BI and AI leverage curated data to produce sound insights, but getting to curated data requires some discipline around data layout, modeling, and governance. In this chapter, we will look at ways...