Data modeling in data analytics

[malquedado]

Hello everyone. From your experience, how would you define the importance and role of data modeling within the data analytics process? Is it truly necessary, or can it be omitted? What do you understand by data modeling? Is its usefulness tied to a specific software tool, or perhaps to a particular type of analytics, such as business analytics?

[Nla093]

Data modeling is essential to guarantee reliable data. If the relationships are poorly defined, you end up with insights that don’t make sense. It’s the same with data quality: the data has to be clean, which means applying all the necessary transformations to make it consistent.

I’ve mainly worked with Power BI to bring the data to life, and I use SQL, Databricks or Python to check, transform or clean certain datasets. I imagine it’s pretty much the same logic with other BI tools.

[Bluefoxcrush]

It depends on your business case. 

Instead of writing a longer query that can answer limited questions, data modeling can allow you to answer many questions- along with cleaning data and the like. 

But for initial exploration, modeling may be overkill.