Minimal Modeling

Minimal Modeling substack is dedicated to in-depth discussion of all kinds of topics related to the database modeling.

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Table of contents (work in progress)

General principles

• Concatenability;

• Idempotence;

• Minimality;

• Dependencies;

• Erasure;

• Game theory;

Data

• Primary data

• Secondary data

• Time-series data

Minimal modeling

• Nouns

  • Existence;

• Attributes

• Relations

Data types

• Pure data types

  • Numbers

  • Strings and text

  • Blobs;

  • Date/time;

    • Handling time with super-second resolution

• Structural data types

  • Booleans;

  • Enums;

    • Extending booleans to enums

  • Pairs;

  • Either/or/or;

    • JSON representation

    • Concatenability;

    • Dependent and independent pieces of data;

    • Database storage: pt. I, pt. II, pt. III

    • Schema evolution;

  Further topics

  • IDs;

  • NULLs;

  • JSON-based data types;

  • Polymorphic data;

  • Postal addresses;

  • Personal names;

  • Counts;

  • Database constraints;

Schema catalog

• Catalog of nouns

• Catalog of attributes

• Catalog of links

• Extracting logical schema;

Narratives

Knowledge management

Physical representation

• Wide tables

• Narrow tables

• Side-tables

• Left join: pt. I, pt. II

• Union all: pt. I, pt. II

• JSON-based representations

• Schemaless

• Temporality

• Atomicity;

• Propagation delay;

Schema evolution

• Adding anchors, attributes, links;

• Getting rid of attributes, links, anchors;

• Changing attributes, links, anchors;

Data management techniques

• Deleting bulk data;

Modeling common tasks

• Modeling mutual friendship;

Secondary data

• Change tracking;

• Replication;

• Indexes;

• Catalog of secondary data;

Classical relational model

• First normal form (1NF);

Software development

• ORM design: pt. I;

• Data dependencies;

Stakeholders and their concerns

• Development managers;

• database administrators;

• physical storage management;

• storage budgeting;

• PII compliance (GDPR); 

• financial compliance (SOX); 

• payments compliance (PCI DSS);

• software developers;

• Devops;

• internal compliance;

• Security;

• data scientists.

About the author

I started working with databases around 1996. The idea of this Substack has been brewing for few years already.

Super-short CV: software developer (+database administrator) — team lead — project manager — head of software development (150+ people) — burned out — dinosaur.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.