Data Architecture Glossary

A single reference for the terms introduced across this section — link here instead of re-deriving a definition from an earlier page.

Terms

Term	Meaning	Defined in
Conceptual model	Business-language description of entities and relationships	Data Modeling & Schema Design
Logical model	Attributes, keys, and relationships, independent of storage engine	Data Modeling & Schema Design
Physical model	Concrete tables, types, and indexes for a specific storage engine	Data Modeling & Schema Design
Star schema	Denormalized fact/dimension design optimized for analytical queries	Data Modeling & Schema Design
Golden record	The single trusted, authoritative version of an entity	Master Data Management
Match/merge	The process of detecting and combining records that represent the same entity	Master Data Management
Survivorship rule	The rule that decides which source’s value wins when sources disagree	Master Data Management
OLTP	Online Transaction Processing — optimized for fast, frequent, small transactions	Data Storage Architectures
OLAP	Online Analytical Processing — optimized for aggregating large volumes of data	Data Storage Architectures
Data warehouse	Structured, curated store purpose-built for analytical queries	Data Storage Architectures
Data lake / lakehouse	Raw or semi-structured store, schema-on-read, cheap at scale (lakehouse adds warehouse-like structure)	Data Storage Architectures
ETL / ELT	Extract-Transform-Load vs. Extract-Load-Transform — order of transformation relative to loading	Data Integration & Pipelines
CDC	Change Data Capture — streaming database changes as they happen	Data Integration & Pipelines
Idempotency	Safe to re-run a pipeline without creating duplicate or inconsistent results	Data Integration & Pipelines
Data owner	The accountable party for a data domain’s accuracy and definition	Data Governance & Stewardship
Data steward	The person who manages a data domain day to day on the owner’s behalf	Data Governance & Stewardship
Data catalog	An inventory of what data exists and where it lives	Data Governance & Stewardship
Business glossary	The agreed, published definitions of business terms and metrics	Data Governance & Stewardship
DAMA-DMBOK	The standard reference defining data governance, quality, metadata, and MDM as distinct knowledge areas	Data Governance & Stewardship
Kimball / Inmon	The dimensional-bottom-up vs. normalized-top-down data warehouse design methodologies	Data Modeling & Schema Design
PII / PCI	Personally Identifiable Information / Payment Card Industry data	Data Privacy, Security & Compliance
Classification	Labeling data by sensitivity level to drive control decisions	Data Privacy, Security & Compliance
Right to erasure	A regulated individual’s right to request deletion of their personal data	Data Privacy, Security & Compliance
Retention period	The length of time data must or may be kept	Data Lifecycle Management
Legal hold	A requirement to preserve data beyond its normal lifecycle due to litigation or audit	Data Lifecycle Management
Semantic / metrics layer	The layer where a business metric is defined once and reused everywhere	Analytics & BI Architecture
Self-service BI	Letting non-engineering users build their own reports/dashboards	Analytics & BI Architecture
Read replica	A secondary copy of an OLTP database serving read traffic to reduce load on the primary	Data Storage Architectures
Failover group	A managed group of databases that fail over together to a paired region during an outage	Data Storage Architectures
Multi-region writes	A distributed database accepting writes in more than one region simultaneously	Data Storage Architectures
Partition key	Cosmos DB’s physical-modeling equivalent of an index/normalization choice	Data Modeling & Schema Design
Private endpoint	A private IP inside a virtual network for a PaaS resource, removing its public endpoint	Data Privacy, Security & Compliance

Part of Introduction to Data Architecture.