Ch 12 - Stringing Together the Building Blocks
Chapter 12 of Mixed Model Arts
Here’s the final chapter of Part 2, which covers how to string the building blocks of Part 2 together. It’s a short chapter, but punchy (pun intended).
Next up is Part 3, which covers the fun stuff - business processes, the levels of data modeling, organizations and people (insanely important chapter), and evolving your data model. These are all dropping very soon.
Currently touring through Asia, and then off to other parts of the globe, so I’ll drop Part 3 over the next couple of weeks as I have Internet and time. In the meantime, I’m compiling artwork and starting to format the book for print.
Thanks,
Joe
No bags today, no pads, no isolated drills. The coach clears the center of the mat. Just you and a partner, working freestyle. Stop thinking about individual techniques. String them together.
Something clicks. The jab sets up the cross. The cross forces their hands up. With their hands high, you change levels and shoot the takedown. On the ground, the positional work from grappling day kicks in. You’re stringing together combos that once seemed foreign and unintuitive. You’re still new, but you think to yourself, “I feel amazing…and pretty dangerous!”
Data modeling works the same way. Very rarely are you working with things in isolation. But combine them—define clear entities, map the relationships, choose the right grain, aggregate, respect time, and agree on meaning—and a coherent data model emerges. Synthesis is what makes the pieces work across various use cases and forms of data.
Each building block from Part 2 is useful on its own. But they form a system. Change the grain, and your aggregation strategy must adjust. Introduce temporal complexity, and your model needs to be time-aware. Conflicting semantics can undermine an otherwise sound entity model.
