Services | Data Evaluation

Cygnus Technology Services has over 30 years experience designing clear, complete, consistent data structures that efficiently and reliably power some of the most successful organizations in the world — large and small — and that enable “downstream” data consumers, e.g. reporting, analytics, training artificial intelligence (AI) models, etc, that depend entirely on the integrity, cleanliness, and clarity of this data to produce mission-crucial results quickly and accurately.

Data design isn’t something that gets much love these days, but we want to help make sure that your data foundation is solid, regardless of technical level or available resources, so we can help evaluate your existing or planned data design so that you can get started on the right foot instead of struggling to keep up!

Even with the very best of intentions, it’s all too easy for any team to fall into the expensive mistakes and anti-patterns I describe in my popular How Bad Things Happen … in the Data Layer article on Medium:

• Dangerously over-permissioned database roles,
• “Hard” rather than “soft” deletes,
• Inconsistent or local timezone use for timestamps,
• Lack of partitioning,
• Expensive and difficult-to-test and maintain referential integrity logic,
• Needless complexity,
• Inconsistent business entity/table and attribute/column naming and data typing,
• Poor understanding of the power and importance of business entity relationships,
• Lack of rich business entity metadata and scripted lookup/reference data,
• Inconsistent “is a” vs “has a” business entity, association, and hierarchy modeling,
• “Grab bag” or “god” tables that combine attributes belonging to several business entities,
• Underutilization of database functions and stored procedures, and
• Moving more and more database work into the service layer, i.e. using the wrong tools for the job

Let’s evaluate your existing or planned data structures so that you can start collecting and benefitting from clear, complete, consistent data sets today!