The term "digital transformation" has been around now for a couple of years. Like so many such terms, it was something of a neologism, a phrase much like Big Data or, for that matter, Data Scientist, that started out more as market-speak than anything else, but that, for one reason or another, started accreting a second…

Marketing, at least in the IT sector, has been replaced by memes. Every so often a Gartner slide deck goes viral, and the next thing anyone knows, pithy and mostly meaningless phrases and sayings are driving Fortune 500 strategies. Execs commit to multi-billion-dollar initiatives to make sure that their companies are perceived as being hip or cool (or,…

This is the first in a series about cross format data modeling principles.

Names are Simple, Right?

In the data modeling realm, there is perhaps no example that is as ubiquitous as modelling personal names. After all, things don’t get much simpler than a name:

Simple, right? Well, not so fast. This isn’t really a model, but rather an instance of a model - an actual example that proves out the model. There are, however, a number of ways that…

Recently, creators of JSON databases have dealt with a fundamental problem. Simply storing and retrieving a given document by a specific key, while useful in any number of scenarios, is not so useful when people want to query that JSON content. This is not really that surprising - once you start gathering data into a database, one of the key requirements that…

Data modeling is usually one of those subjects that make people's eyes glaze over. It's not really programming, though understanding programming concepts such as objects, inheritance, polymorphism and similar multisyllabic words is usually helpful to do modeling. It's not a business analyst function, though most BAs end up participating in the modeling process. Perhaps the best way of thinking about modeling is to see it as a way to describe a business in clearly defined pieces.

From…

A funny thing happened in the last few years. We began to lose the Closed World Assumption.

Now I can understand that this is not exactly huge, earth-shattering news; most people do not in fact realize that they've been using the Closed World Assumption to begin with. However, I'd contend that this event is having a transformative effect upon the way…