An overview of data modeling

Data modeling is a conceptual process, representing the associations between the data in a manner in which it caters to specific business requirements. In this process, the various data tables are linked as per the business rules to achieve business needs.

Let's understand data modeling using a real-life example. Assume that we want to understand the buying pattern of a customer in the retail industry. For this analysis, we would require the following details:

• Customer details: This detail is stored in the Customer table
• Sales transactions: This detail could be stored in multiple tables, but let's assume that this data is available in the Sales table
• Product details: This detail is available in the Product table

If we wish to find what products are bought by a customer, we need to link all the preceding tables with each other to get the required information. The mechanism of linking tables with each other entails the process of building the data model.

In our example, once we link the required tables with each other, we get following data model:

Data modeling helps a business in many ways. Let's look at some of the advantages of data modeling:

• High speed retrieval: Data modeling helps to get the required information much faster than expected. This is because the data is interlinked between the different tables using the relationship.
• Provides ease of accessing data: Data modeling eases the process of giving the right access of the data to the end users. With the simple data query language, you can get the required data easily.
• Helps in handling multiple relations: Various datasets have various kinds of relationship between the other data. For example, there could be one-to-one, or one-to-many, or many-to-many relationships. Data modeling helps in handling this kind of relationship easily.
• Stability: Data modeling provides stability to the system.