Semantic Data Modeling For Fun and Profit

Data modeling is usually one of those subjects that make people's eyes glaze over. It's not really programming, though understanding programming concepts such as objects, inheritance, polymorphism and similar multisyllabic words is usually helpful to do modeling. Perhaps the best way of thinking about modeling is to see it as a way to describe a business in clearly defined pieces. From a business perspective, if done right, data modeling can prove quite valuable. When done badly, modeling can prove worse than useless, since a big part of the value of modeling is to employ it to make predictions.