A City, Still Rolled Up
Before there's a city, there's a rolled-up blueprint and an empty lot — the same is true of any data ecosystem, and never more so than now, when AI has joined the list of residents who'll need to read the plan.
Part 1
Part 2
Three Drafts of the Same House
The three levels every data model passes through — conceptual, logical, and physical — and how AI is starting to help draft each one faster.
Part 3
Who's Related to Whom
How entity-relationship modelling works — entities, attributes, and relationship types — through the familiar lens of a family tree, and how AI is changing the way relationships get discovered.
Part 4
A Pantry That Makes Sense
What normalization (and denormalization) actually mean, why duplicated data quietly causes inconsistency, and how AI is changing how that duplication gets found.
Part 5
Designing the Store Floor
How dimensional modelling (star and snowflake schemas) organizes data around how people ask questions, not just how it's stored — and how AI is changing who's "walking the store."
Part 6
The Library and the Storage Unit
The difference between modelling for a data warehouse versus a data lake — structure-first versus store-first approaches — and how AI is starting to act as an on-demand librarian for the more flexible option.
Part 7
Renovating a House With People Still Inside
How schema evolution and versioning let a data model change safely over time without breaking everything downstream — and how AI is making it safer to swing the hammer.
Part 8
An Apprentice Who Drafts While You Decide
What AI-assisted and automated data modelling tools actually do today, and why the human architect's judgment still matters as much as ever.
Part 9
A Tour Guide for the City's Data
What semantic layers and knowledge graphs add on top of a data model, and why AI tools are only as trustworthy as the shared meaning they're given.
Part 10
The City, Reassembled
How every concept from this series fits together as one AI-ready city, and where data modelling's evolving relationship with AI is likely headed next.
Part 11
Additions Don't Need a Demolition Permit: Additive Schema Changes
why adding a new room to a house is a much smaller undertaking than tearing down a load-bearing wall, and why additive schema changes are the safest, cheapest kind of schema evolution.
Part 12
Which Walls Are Load-Bearing: Identifying Breaking Changes
why a contractor checks the structural drawings before touching any wall, and why identifying which schema changes genuinely break something is the core skill of safe schema evolution.
Part 13
The Plaque on the Cornerstone: Schema Versioning Schemes
why a building's cornerstone plaque records exactly which year and revision it was built to, and why a schema needs the same clear, honest versioning.
Part 14
Two Crews Reading the Same Blueprint: Backward and Forward Compatibility
why a renovation crew and the building's existing tenants sometimes have to work from the same set of drawings during a phased transition, and what backward and forward compatibility mean for a schema.
Part 15
The Permit Office: Schema Change Review and Governance
why a city requires a permit before real construction begins, and why schema changes benefit from the same deliberate review checkpoint.
Part 16
Moving Tenants to the New Wing: The Expand-Contract Migration Pattern
why a building manager moves tenants into a new wing before demolishing the old one, and how the expand-contract pattern applies this same sequencing to schema migrations.
Part 17
The Condemned Wing: Deprecating and Removing Old Schema Elements
why a building manager posts a condemnation notice with a real timeline before finally demolishing an empty wing, and why deprecating old schema elements deserves the same deliberate, visible process.
Part 18
A City of Many Boroughs, Many Blueprints: Schema Evolution in Distributed Systems
why a city made of independently governed boroughs can't renovate on one unified timeline, and why schema evolution across microservices requires the same decentralized discipline.
Part 19
The Contractor Who Reads Every Blueprint at Once: AI-Assisted Schema Change Impact Analysis
why a contractor who could instantly cross-reference every building's blueprint in the city would catch problems no single-building review ever could, and what AI-assisted schema change impact analysis does at that same scale.
Part 20
The City That Never Stops Being Built
from the first rolled-up blueprint to the contractor who reads every blueprint in the city at once, every article's lesson reassembled into one city that keeps being built on, safely, without ever needing to be torn down.