Data modeling
Data modeling is the process of creating a logical representation of the data stored in your database. By modeling data, you bring information into your application in a format that makes sense for your business.
How it works
The data model defines the types of information in your application, such as patient records and physician profiles, and their relationships to one another. For example, your data model might represent the data used by your application to retrieve patient data from a database, pass the home address and medical codes to a service that returns a list of physicians, and then format the results so that case workers process service names and descriptions instead of numeric medical codes.
The following figure illustrates the relationships among components in a data model for a sample billing application.
Data models for physicians and patients
Key terms and concepts
To model data, you need the following components:
- Data objects
- Categories of data that have fields, field mappings, and connections to data sources.
- Fields
- Properties that store and format the data in your application.