← All courses

🧩 Data Model Patterns

The patterns that turn up in almost every business schema — Party and roles, effective dating, order to cash. What each one solves, why it holds, and what it looks like as a working app, with pointers to the literature behind it.

No lessons published yet — this is the roadmap, so you can see exactly what the course will cover before it lands.

Series 1 · The Core Four

the party model, roles, effective dating and contact details

  1. 01

    The Party Model — One Table for People and Companies, and Why

    beginner#foundationalcoming soon
  2. 02

    Roles, Not Tables — When a Customer Is Also a Supplier

    beginner#foundationalcoming soon
  3. 03

    Party Relationships — Employment, Ownership and Who Reports to Whom

    beginnercoming soon
  4. 04

    Effective Dating — Keeping the Price That Was True Last March

    beginner#foundationalcoming soon
  5. 05

    Type and Status Tables — The Enum That Grows Without a Migration

    beginnercoming soon
  6. 06

    Contact Mechanisms — Addresses, Emails and Phones Without Twelve Columns

    beginnercoming soon

Series 2 · The Business Flows

how products, orders, invoices and inventory get modelled

  1. 01

    Products, Variants and Features — Modelling What You Actually Sell

    intermediatecoming soon
  2. 02

    Price Components — Discounts, Tiers and the Price That Depends

    intermediatecoming soon
  3. 03

    Order to Cash — Order, Shipment, Invoice, Payment as One Chain

    intermediate#projectcoming soon
  4. 04

    Invoicing — Line Items That Point at Anything

    intermediatecoming soon
  5. 05

    Inventory and Locations — Where the Thing Physically Is

    intermediatecoming soon
  6. 06

    Work Effort — Tasks, Time and What Anyone Actually Did

    intermediatecoming soon

Series 3 · Abstraction and Its Price

how far to make a model generic, and when to stop

  1. 01

    Levels of Abstraction — The Same Model, Four Ways

    advanced#deep-abstractioncoming soon
  2. 02

    Hierarchies — Org Charts, Categories and Bills of Materials

    advancedcoming soon
  3. 03

    Classification — Categories That Change Without a Migration

    advancedcoming soon
  4. 04

    The Fully Generic Model — Why Everything-Is-a-Thing Fails

    advanced#deep-abstractioncoming soon
  5. 05

    Choosing a Level — A Decision Rule You Can Defend in Review

    advanced#projectcoming soon

Where this leads

Not here, on purpose

  • Keys, normalization and how to decide what the tables should be — covered in Data Modeling — this track starts after that decision, from patterns already proven
  • How real shipped apps modelled it, and where they diverged — covered in Schema Teardowns — that track is evidence from apps people actually shipped; this one is the patterns the industry already agreed on
  • Star schemas, slowly changing dimensions and the analytics reshape — designed in Data Modeling, Series 3; built and queried in Data Warehousing — these patterns are operational models, not reporting ones
  • The DataPallas app-building mechanics themselves — each episode builds one, but the how-to lives in the DataPallas docs; here the app is the proof, not the subject