Summary
Data dictionnary came with creating DBMS in the 1960’s. Organization’s created them to know what and how their data was structured. Data dictionnary describe data and this include information about the data, data type, structure details and security restrictions.
Data dictionnary support the data structure, the technical infrastructures that connect the business strategy and the date strategy with the technical execution. High-quality metadata describes data and their relationships. Engineers and other workerss use this information to build, troubleshooting, maintaining, and improving the data solution foundations.
Data dictionnaries covers how technical entity works, and as the data changes all the time, many data dictionnaries nned to be update and aligned with theses changes, leveraging automated tools. Changes can include at least one of these three categories:
- (1) Business Concepts
- Associatinos
- Components
- Contraints
- Elements
- Roles
- (2) Data Types
- Active dictionnaries
- Passive dictionaries
- (3) Message Elements
- Message Components
- Contraints
- Message Elements
Why Businesses use them.
- Ensure agreement between the business facing content and technical facing data
- Reduce the risk of downstream errors and rework
- Provide valuable reports and dashboard components
- Assure smoother database upgrades
- Guarantee more meaningful metadata
Data Dictionary Use Cases
- The USGS documents its data dictionnary and proivdes public access to promote sharing of its common data structures.
- Medicare data dictionnaries play a crucial role in communicating information about patient deaths.
- Cloud computing trend
What’s the difference between Data Dictionnaries from Data Catalogs?
While data dictionnaries and catalogs oeverlap in their content and definitions. They have different purposes, audiences, and focuses. Data Dictionnary provide technical instructions to build, update, use and maintain dataarchitecutre. The informaiton is most relevant to engineers who do activities like integrating dataset betweens systems. Data Catalogs are built off data dictionnaries, and are more user-friendly interface which makes it easier to search and retrieve relevant data sets.
Data Dictionnary vs Data Models.
Data dictionnary is a type of model -a physical model, and it does not mean the same thing as a data model data. Conceptual data models describe business needs at a high level, defining the database’s structure and organization. Logical models cover how to meet those requirements.
Data dictionnary is only one type of physical data model, for example JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and flow charts may represent a physical data model.
What’s the key function of Data Dictionnary?
Data dictionnary is use to share the understanding of the metadata and the system impoliemntation of their data solutions. However, the dictionnary ensure efficient Data Architecture engineering. It accomplishes the goal by aligning any fixes and improviements to the orginal design and purpose.
The use of data dictionnary is the gain on Data Quality when they are used and updated from one place. Furthemore, they have an easier time improving and making future data infrastructure when researching from a standardized dictionnary version.
(2) Types of Data Dictionnary.
Active Data Dictionnary
DBMS offers an integrated data dictionnary as the reference automatically updates as changes and providing the most up-to-date definitions. IT usually manages this kind of dictionnary because its interactive interface requires more advanced technical knowledge.
Active dictionnary prohibits any code executions as it can compromise the data integrety.
Passive Data Dictionnary
Passive data dictionnary is the metadata reference where updates and maintenance happens outside the bDMS. This manipulation requires manual intervention to keep it up to date.
Users access passive data dictionnaries through an application where the user update a statics document, like a pdf or a binder full of documents. Typically, organization’s do not use passive data dictionary as a sole source of truth. Since update in passive data dictionnary are manual, there could be a significant lag of time in reflecting the changes. This situation happens when the responsible person may not have the time to update the dictionnary immediately after the change is implemented. The delay can lead with discrepancies between the dicionnary and the current state of the data.