Information drives businesses who make decisions based on data. Data is a corporate asset. Data modeling is critical to understanding data, its interrelationships, and its rules. Yet, some people don‘t understand the value that data modeling provides. Some perceive it as just documentation, as a bottleneck to Agile development, or even as too expensive to be worth it.
The buzz around the terms NoSQL, schemaless, and non-relational has further promoted the illusion of a silver bullet. But is it realistic to think that one can design an application with no structure, no schema, and no relationships? Isn’t it ironic also that schema design is one of NoSQL’s toughest challenges, triggering countless how-to videos, blogs, and books?
A data model is not just documentation, because it can be forward-engineered into a physical database. Not only is data modeling not a bottleneck to application development, it has demonstrated time and again that it accelerates development, significantly reduces maintenance, increases application quality, and lowers execution risks across the enterprise. Experience has shown that relying on the intuition of software developers is not a repeatable process or one insuring first-time-right success.
Benefits of Data Modeling
Higher Application Quality
A data model is the equivalent of an architect’s blueprint before a building construction starts. Data modeling is the visual expression of a development team’s understanding of the business and its rules. The data modeling process is the most effective way to gather correct and complete business data requirements and business rules, so as to ensure that the system will operate in the intended manner. The process generates more questions than any other modeling approach, leading to higher integrity and discovery of the relevant business rules. And, its visual nature facilitates communication and collaboration between business users and subject matter experts.
Quicker Time to Market
Thanks to proper data modeling, application developers don’t have to discover unknown requirements themselves, and can focus on developing with fewer errors and reach their sprint commitments. This will in turn lead to earlier delivery of high-quality, value-adding functionality, easier acceptance testing, and a quicker payback on development.
Lower Development and Maintenance Costs
Data modeling catches errors and inconsistencies early in the process, when they are easy and cheap to correct. Given the exponential evolution of bug fixing costs as a project progresses, it’s always better to evaluate and think through options early, rather than after the software has been written. Even more so in an Agile development environment, development costs can be reduced significantly because a good data model will reveal upfront otherwise unknown or unanticipated requirements. And with NoSQL’s flexibility, the data model can rapidly evolve in an organized manner.
Improved Data Quality
Data corruption and inaccurate data are even worse than application errors. A good data model defines the metadata so the data itself can be properly understood, queried, and reported on. To truly leverage the power and flexibility of NoSQL, it is still important to ensure the enforcement of domain definitions, field constraints, editing rules, and integrity of relationships. It actually turns out to be more important given that such enforcement is seldom possible at the database level, and needs to be maintained in the application code. A data model will provide the developers with a roadmap and checklist for such enforcement.
Better Performance
Data modeling provides DBAs with the means to understand the database and tune it for fast performance, without having to search through the code to discover the schema. Given the nature of NoSQL, the data modeling process outlines a method to start thinking in terms of queries and data representation, rather than in terms of storage.
Business Intelligence
What’s the use of possessing a great deal of data, only to have no efficient way – or no way at all – to use it? In other words: how can one effectively query their Big Data if they do not know what is in it, or how it is structured? A good data model, built on query and reporting requirements, is a starting point for data mining. It will spot trends and patterns, and make predictions to help a business navigate challenges and opportunities.
Documentation and Knowledge Transfer
Data modeling provides documentation to facilitate communication between business stakeholders and technical experts, using a common vocabulary and a business domain glossary. A data model is effective at expressing abstractions in a clear and succinct manner, and it serves as a training aid through staff turnover.
Enhanced Integration
With data modeling of all corporate applications, the creation of a meta-repository provides a common vocabulary, identifies relationships and redundancies, and resolves discrepancies so disparate systems are well integrated together.
