Universal data language

Understand the importance of every person in every role talking about data using the same vocabulary.

What is a Universal Data Language?

When it comes to data and ensuring everyone who touches it at all levels in a company or project are saying the same things can be difficult. A primary goal at Outerbase is to help define a universal data language by using your database as a source of truth for nomenclature. For large enterprises and messy data this may sound frightening, but core features such as our Data Catalog can help clean it up.

Just as it is important for the database maintainer to try to reason about relationships of objects before creating them as tables, similar conversations are had at the business level and the entire rest of the data stack when it comes to implementing them for end users.

1. How does a user and a session correlate?

2. When do we consider a user "activated" or "churned"?

Above are just a few examples on how we reason about both direct relationships, and business relationships. Both "activated" and "churn" are probably only known on the business level by the product team so that information often doesn't proliferate down to others – which means there isn't truly a universal data language.

How about "session". What is a session? What does a session consist of? How long does a session last? What can terminate a session event? Knowing all of this information is a requirement for both a database engineer and a backend developer perhaps.

But shouldn't we aim for everyone to talk with the same words and meanings? Of course.