6 Comments

Interesting, I thought organizational debt here was going to refer to what I’ve come to call the “semantic debt” that starts (or has the potential) to accrue once you create the model - i.e. the potential drift between actual and modeled business concepts or processes if you don’t stay on top of it. Particularly the shifts that don’t correspond to breaking changes that can bring them to the surface. In my experience that idea is hard for people to grasp.

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Good point though. I’ve written elsewhere about the entropic nature of data, and how it drifts from the original concepts and definitions. Very good observation. Thanks!

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Rereading after commenting and I guess this idea would fall under “data debt.”

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And with data models, once reports are made with a model, it is difficult to refactor without breaking changes in reports.

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I recently heard of a table with 35,000 columns. Extreme OBT. Yeah, have fun refactoring that.

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I first heard the phrase "There is no such thing as a free lunch." from Robert H. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress science fiction novel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch

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