What’s a data architect?

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A data architect is a person designated to be responsible for the design, structure, organization and maintenance of data for a particular company or project. Just as an architect carefully plans the blueprints for a building, a data architect carefully plots the structure and organization of data relevant to a business or project. He or she may work for a single company and focus entirely on internal data or work for a database group and assist multiple companies with their data.

A data architect fills a variety of roles and maintains a variety of responsibilities. He is responsible for evaluating data usage and linking data directly to a company’s goals and practices so that clear results are provided. Someone in this position must ensure the accuracy and accessibility of all important data and is responsible for knowing what data is important and why. He or she often acts as an intermediary, deducing the data needs of a particular group and explaining the importance and use of the data most relevant to them.

There are a number of tools that someone in data architecture uses throughout their career. In addition to basic databases, a data architect often creates something called a metadata registry. This is in a sense a database that catalogs what data is available instead of cataloging the actual data. A metadata registry can organize data on a much more massive scale than a basic database, because it doesn’t need to contain the information itself, just reference it.

Nearly all data architects are familiar with data-driven computer languages ​​like SQL. In an attempt to simplify a rather complicated system, SQL is a data query language based on retrieving data stored according to mathematical relationships. Rather than storing numbers, SQL databases represent all kinds of information in mathematical terms and use mathematical tools to sort the information. Other data-oriented languages, such as XML, are likely to be regular tools by people in this position.

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