In the first half of this paper, Larissa Moss explores the origin and significance of data modeling, as well as the concepts and principles behind the technique. She also explains the differences between logical and physical data modeling, something that has been vastly misunderstood by many Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehouse (DW) practitioners and, as a result, has led to many useless database designs debates among experts.

In the second half, Steve Hoberman focuses on physical data modeling by describing the various mature and proven database design options available for BI/DW databases. And, at the conclusion of this paper, a case study is presented to further underscore the concepts put forth.