Today’s TDS episode is all about data and data models, and why they matter. Deciding how to model your data ahead of time can pay off down the road. It helps ensure that the people who are using the data get what they need from it and can reduce technical debt. Data modeling is a way of mapping out and visualizing all the different places that a software or application stores information, and how these sources of data will fit together and flow into one another. This is a hugely important stage in the design process for any business-critical IT system. When developers are figuring out how a new system will work, they establish what the most pressing needs of a business are, what kind of data they’ll need to access in order to meet those needs, and how the data will be used. From there, they can start to create a diagram (or model) of how each pocket of data will flow into each other, and how they’ll interact.