Week 1 - Data modeling is hard

Please use Canvas to return the assignments: https://ucsb.instructure.com/courses/32934/assignments/459630

In class we’ve been discussing some simple data modeling: students belong to a house, they enroll in courses. Alas, in the real world, data modeling can be quite difficult. There is no one right answer; rather, describing the data is often a balancing act between competing concerns:

• The fidelity of the data description (how accurate or detailed or granular do we want to be, do we need to be?);
• The functional requirements (what do we need to do with this data?);
• Understandability and maintainability (complexity is its own evil); and
• Data availability (there’s no point in describing attributes if you can’t populate them).

Please briefly reflect on an experience in your career (could be your capstone work, could be something else) where you spent time thinking about how to organize or structure your data.

• Were you successful? Did you model the data in such a way that you could get your work done, and possibly also make it easy to extend in the future?
• Or, despite your best efforts, did you run into problems down the road and find that you wished you had done things differently? In that case, did you walk away with any learning experiences?

Credit: 10pts