5 Data Modeling Techniques and Concepts for Business

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Data Modeling is essential for every business. Whether you’re planning on building a new business or you already have an existing one, you’ll want to be sure you have a solid plan when it comes to analyzing the data insights that can transform your business. If you’re not familiar with how data modeling works, we recommend reaching out to the good folks over at valueblue.com – they can assist you with all of your data insights and data modeling needs.

In order to understand data modeling techniques, we first need to understand what data modeling is.

What is Data Modeling?

In simple words, data modeling refers to the analyses of data and the correlation between the given data and the objects being studied. Data modeling allows data to be stored in a database; it simplifies complex data and makes it understandable.

There are three main types of data modeling:

Logical data model

A logical data model is created by data architects and business analysts. It forms the basis of the physical data model and sits between conceptual and physical data models.

Conceptual data model

The conceptual model is a high-level abstract data model that allows people to view the type of data that they want to view, like market data or customer data.

Physical data model

A physical data model or PDM is used to design the internal scheme of a database, which depicts data in table or column form, and shows the relationship between the data in question.

Data Modeling Techniques and Concepts

There are several data modeling techniques that businesses can use to organize the data and change the way they function.

• Hierarchical Technique

The hierarchical technique is one of the most commonly used techniques; it originated in the 1960s. The hierarchical technique uses the principle of hierarchy to store data in a tree-like format. The data is stored in the form of parent and child records, a parent can have multiple children, but a child record can only have one parent record. In the hierarchical technique, the connection between the records comes in the form of links.

• Network Technique

The network technique offers a flexible way of representing objects and relationships between entities. It is an extension of the hierarchical model that allows the child record to have multiple parents. A standard specification of the network technique was adopted in 19699 by the Conference on Data Systems and Languages, known as CODASYL now. With the network model, it is much easier to convey complex relationships.

• The Entity-Relationship Technique

The ER model is a high-level model that looks at the real world as entities and relationships. This model represents an entire database in the form of an entity-relationship diagram. It is a conceptual design that makes data much easier to understand and provides a better view of the data being studied.

• Relational Technique

The relational model is an alternative to the hierarchical model. It represents data in the form of tables, making the data less complex and easier to understand. It describes different relationships between entities and can be used for several sets of relationships, like one to one, many to one, and many to many.

• Object-oriented technique

The object-oriented model works by using programming. In this technique, different values are stored inside objects, and the objects can represent multiple relationships.

These are some of the data modeling techniques you can use for your business.