When dealing with transactional data often there are many levels of granularity lying within. Finding these granularities exposes how your data is shaped as it accumulates and helps paint a better picture of what I like to call Lifes within the data. In this post, I want to share a technique I use to find data patterns which will be beneficial for everyone from the analyst to the architect.
Why do I refer to these data patterns as Lifes?
I haven’t found anything transactional in nature that doesn’t have some sort of recurring theme, with a distinct beginning and end, that couldn’t tell a story. It is these finite beginning/ends, start/stops, on/offs that paint the picture that is the “life” of the data. The life of these stories often have many sub-narratives and are interwoven within a single holistic life of the data. A great example is the familiar case of a customer purchase history. The customer is the holistic life of the data, their purchase orders, individual line items, and even a particular line item purchased over several purchase orders are all examples of sub-narratives within the story of a single customer.