Modeling styles and architectures

In this chapter, we have introduced data modeling and seen how it is used to describe the data we have or how we want it to become.

Data modeling is the basic tool to describe the data but building a data platform is more than describing the data hosted in the platform and the relationships between the various entities. As an example, how you load new data into the tables and how you update all the intermediate tables to keep your data marts up to date is a key point that is not captured by a data model.

In the next chapter, we will look in more detail at the overall data life cycle, but in this section, we want to introduce a few design styles that are heavily connected to how you develop data models for your data platform.

The great news is that with dbt, there are no preferences or limitations, and you can adopt any of these different paradigms and implement whichever will work best.

We will start with the Kimball method, which introduces...