Database Schema Design: Best Practices for Integration and Analysis

Good database schema design is crucial for efficient data analytics and faster creation of reports and dashboards. A well-designed schema organizes data into tables with appropriate attributes, shows interrelationships between tables and columns, and imposes constraints such as data types. Normalization is a process that helps eliminate duplicate, redundant, and derived data values in a database. Entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) are visual representations of schemas or entity-relationship models, representing the interrelations between tables. By understanding the underlying data model and normalizing the schema, analysts can make sense of the data and build effective dashboards and reports.