02. What is Data Modeling?

Common Questions

Why can't everything be stored in a giant Excel spreadsheet?

• There are limitations to the amount of data that can be stored in an Excel sheet. So, a database helps organize the elements into tables - rows and columns, etc. Also reading and writing operations on a large scale is not possible with an Excel sheet, so it's better to use a database to handle most business functions.

Does data modeling happen before you create a database, or is it an iterative process?

• It's definitely an iterative process. Data engineers continually reorganize, restructure, and optimize data models to fit the needs of the organization.

How is data modeling different from machine learning modeling?

• Machine learning includes a lot of data wrangling to create the inputs for machine learning models, but data modeling is more about how to structure data to be used by different people within an organization. You can think of data modeling as the process of designing data and making it available to machine learning engineers, data scientists, business analytics, etc., so they can make use of it easily.