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The OBT Fallacy & Popcorn Analytics
With the acceleration of technology, hyper-scalability, and subsequent increased analytic team agility it’s no wonder true data modelling discipline has taken a back seat to query-on-demand analytics. What is wrong with this? What does it mean to your business when your data analytics department ignores data modelling discipline in favour of producing query results as fast as possible? Because data engineers are burdened with being data modellers as well, the lessons and reasons for why we apply the rigour to data modelling is overlooked because to a data engineer the focus is automation, not data modelling. This has given rise to two extremes on the “data modelling” scale; popcorn analytics and the One Big Table (colloquially known as “OBT”).
What does DAMA say about the data modelling knowledge area?
The DAMA wheel is an excellent guide to the many facets of data analytics and clearly through decades of experience and expert advice, DAMA have identified that data modelling is best performed by data modellers and business analysts and in fact data developers, or rather data engineers, are consumers of data models. Interesting.
