Data Engineer Interview Series:Data Modeling-Part 2

Data Engineering Life Cycle

from Fundamentals of Data Engineering book by Joe Reis and Matt Housley

Flow of the article

The goal of this article is to provide a cheatsheet to those preparing for a data engineering interview.

Caveat: this is a cheatsheet I wrote when I was preparing for my interviews. If you would like me to add or change anything please let me know in the comments.

In this article, I will go over all the definitions one needs to be aware of regarding data modeling, while preparing for a data engineering interview. This is the second half to the first article (link). In this article I will go over the theory of the data modeling concepts and will end the article with a data modeling question, the solution to the question and the thought process I will explain in the third article.

What is a data model?

A data model represents the way data relates to the real world. It is an abstraction that organizes elements of data and how they relate to each other. A data model reflects how, the data must be structured and standardized to best reflect an organization’s processes, workflows and logic.

• A good data model captures how communication and work-streams naturally flow within an organization.