Designing Data Architecture

Designing data architecture is an important stage in the development of an organisation, even though processes do not always take it into account from the very beginning of a project. Having documented data models, however, helps to avoid many mistakes — both in service development and in making decisions based on collected data.

In this talk, I will share the approaches we have used to design data architecture.

In particular, we will look at different levels: the business glossary, the logical data model (LDM), the physical data model (PDM), and the relationships between them. We will also touch on the importance of maintaining a conceptual data model.

We will discuss which tools can be used for LDM and which for PDM, and how to link them together.

Finally, we will consider how to build these models incrementally — in other words, what to do when a working system already exists but the need for formalised models has become clear.