Data Integration and Data Modelling demystified

This article consolidates a large amount of content from the book Data Management at Scale. This content didn’t make it to the final book, because various external reviewers found it unchallenging. So, if you believe you have a good understanding of data management already, the content discussed in this article might sound familiar. However, I have noticed that less mature data professionals find the data integration part and context perspectives, difficult to digest. Therefore I decided to make this content freely available to all of my followers.

Data Integration is considered to be part of data management, but since data integration is such a fundamental area I have put an emphasis on this in this article. To help you to better understand, I’ll begin discussing what data integration is by using layer-by-layer approach and a practical metaphor. Before we will discuss what data integration is about we first must agree on a common viewpoint on what data exactly is, how data is structured, and how it is stored and used in applications. Because of this, data modelling and data integration will be discussed together.

Demystifying data

Before we dive deep into the content, let’s first untangle data and try to define it better. Since the definition of data varies among business readers and technical readers, I find it important to show three viewpoints.

Business viewpoint: Business professionals usually use the term data to mean information used…