What’s Data Modeling?

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Data modeling is a way of structuring and organizing data so that it can be used easily by databases. Unstructured data can be found in word processing documents, email messages, audio or video files, and design programs. Data modeling doesn’t want this “ugly” data; rather, it wants data that’s all made up in a nice, neat package for processing by a database.

Data modeling is routinely used in conjunction with a database management system. The data that has been modeled and prepared for this system can be identified in various ways, such as what it represents or how it relates to other data. The idea is to make the data as presentable as possible, so that analysis and integration can be done with minimal effort.

We can also think of data modeling as instructions for creating a database. Focus on the word pattern and you will get what we are looking for here. To create a “pretty” database, you’ll want to follow a pattern as a means to a desired end.

For example, if you want to analyze how many people in a given congressional district voted in the last election, you’ll naturally want to include a column for which party each person voted. That kind of analysis will be invaluable to members of all political parties, and it’s the kind of detail you can build into the database from scratch, instructing the database management system to include that column of information in the resulting database. If you wanted to analyze that information specifically but didn’t include a column for it in your database, you would spend a lot of time collecting the data, effort that wouldn’t be required if you followed the data model in the first place. Data modeling is therefore a very important skill to implement when building databases.

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