How to address the shortcomings of shallow, outdated models and future-proof your modeling strategy
I have been involved in modeling data for over 30 years, creating a variety of data models (3NF, dimensional, ensemble (anchor, data-vault), graphs, etc.) mainly for analytical systems. However, many of these have also gradually become outdated or obsolete. Sometimes it feels like the work of the unfortunate Sisyphus who persistently rolls his boulder up the hill, only to realise at some point that it was in vain again.
For a very long time, I was convinced that it must be possible to centrally model a common and complete view of business matters for a company. After all, long-time business people who have been involved in the modeling process know what’s going on in the company, right? Well, the smaller the company was, the closer I reached the goal. But to be completely honest, in the end, each model remained just an approximation — a static view that tried to reflect the constantly changing reality.
But even if it is quite laborious to create such a model, we absolutely cannot be successful without it. The modern data-driven enterprise is based on the core idea of deriving value from data. However, the fact is that data has no value in and of itself. We need to use…