Database design

Database design or modeling refers to the activity of designing a database and modeling the data and structure that stores, transforms, manages, and extracts data. Why is it important to design a database so elaborately, you ask? Here are some reasons:

• Data is any organization’s most valuable asset and to leverage it to derive the most benefit for the company, we need to ensure it is thoroughly planned and thought through
• As the current generation databases are easy to set up and use, the most common side effect is that business users tend to dive into creating databases with flawed and much-simplified structures without understanding the components of design
• With poorly designed databases, the systems end up having inaccurate results and difficult-to-trace errors, which leads to inconsistent decision-making in the business

If that does not serve your purpose, then consider this: the database is the most critical lifeline of your entire technical architecture as it runs across and connects all the components of your design. It starts with user interfaces, operational systems, messaging services, monitoring systems, analytics solutions, AI/ML applications, and even executive dashboards in the visualization layer that you use for business decision-making. If that lifeline is not well-thought-out, then you are starting your business and technology journey on a path full of surprises, twists, and turns. I understand those are good on paper but very inconvenient when it comes to real-world applications. Imagine having to redesign the foundational component of your understanding 6 months into rolling out your product!

Data modeling

Data modeling is the process of organizing the elements of your data and establishing their relationship with each other and external systems. Within the chosen database environment, a data model represents the structure, attributes (characteristics), relationships, transformations, business rules, and exceptions. There are a lot of data modeling frameworks and tools available in the market, so pick the one that works with your database model, structure of data, business rules, operations, and components of the data.

Database modeling

Database modeling refers to the process of determining the choice and logical structure of your database and designing the way you store, organize, and transform data. I would like to think of a database model as something that needs to be well-vetted out, so that should be the case with the data model. But in a sense, a data model can go through many rounds of trial and error and can evolve as you build compared to a database model, which needs to be designed for scale and also to acclimatize the data model it contains.

Several questions and considerations go into the design and model of a database. That is exactly what we will focus on as a framework in the rest of this chapter.