Microsoft Fabric
Data modeling has always been recognized as a collaborative effort—a team sport that reaches its full potential when it incorporates expertise from across the organization. However, many enterprise data modeling initiatives face a fundamental challenge: inconsistency.
When teams work on different projects, they often create their own conventions, resulting in fragmented and inconsistent data structures. Miscommunication becomes common when the same concept is represented differently across projects, leading to confusion among stakeholders. Most importantly, differing conventions and mappings complicate the integration, interoperability, and scaling of data models across teams or regions. As a result, data architects often spend extra time reconciling differences rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.
SqlDBM allows organizations to overcome these obstacles with a game-changing feature called Global Standards.
What is Global Standards?
Global Standards functions as a centralized repository that allows teams to define, store, and enforce organizational standards across SqlDBM projects. With Global Standards, users can define standards such as glossary terms, naming conventions, and templates in a single place and enforce them on selected projects.
Today, Global Standards include the following components:
- Case standards – Maintain case standards for logical and physical names (e.g., lower, upper, pascal, etc)
- Object naming conventions – templates for object naming and suffix/prefix customizations
- Glossary terms – translations for object naming for logical and physical names
- Column templates – binding sets of reusable columns that can be assigned to tables and views
- Table templates – scripts that can be used to generate custom-defined tables such as T2-dims or data vault hubs
- Flags – metadata icons that allow for visual flagging, object auditing, and diagram filtering
The system operates on a simple yet powerful principle: a Global Standard over a local standard. When a local project is mapped to a Global Standard, it automatically inherits the centralized standards, ensuring consistency without requiring individual teams to manually align their work. This inheritance model ensures that updates to global standards cascade automatically to all mapped projects, maintaining consistency even as standards evolve.
Of course, inheritance does not prevent local projects from extending and creating their own standards. As long as there are no conflicts with Global Standards, local projects are free to maintain their own Glossary terms and templates.
Working alongside Global Reference—which enables teams to share read-only versions of objects across projects in a data mesh, using a publish-subscribe approach—Global Standards creates a unified framework that serves the entire organization.
How Global Standards Work
Standards, especially when they span multiple teams and data products, are a crucial component of an enterprise data strategy. Unlike Global References, which uses an opt-in publish-subscribe model, Global Standards are enforced on participating child projects. Due to the magnitude of the responsibility, creating and enforcing Global Standards is limited to project administrators—users who already hold important senior architect roles.
The process then follows a simple inheritance model that works in a sequential fashion:
- Create a Global Standards project
- Define standards and conventions within the Global Standards project.
- Map the Global Standard to selected child projects.
- (Teams are free to create multiple Standards and apply them to projects of the same database type)
- (A child project can only be mapped to one Standards project at a time)
- Open the child project(s) to set the enforced standards.
- (A summary of standards and changes is presented, which must be accepted and applied before further changes to the child project can be saved)
- Repeat. Make additional changes to the Global Standards project and repeat step 4.
To avoid placing undue bottlenecks on admins (and alternate admins), non-admin modelers can be added as participants to Global Standards projects, allowing them to make changes as well.
Summary
Global Standards is more than just a new feature—it’s a strategic investment in the future of collaborative data modeling, setting organizations up for scalable, long-term success. By providing the tools and framework necessary to maintain consistency at scale, organizations can transform their approach from a fragmented, team-by-team effort into a unified, enterprise-wide capability.
For data architects working with distributed teams, Global Standards eliminates one of the most time-consuming aspects of enterprise data management: the constant need to review and police team projects for consistency. Instead of spending time reconciling differences between teams or ensuring compliance with organizational standards, architects can focus on high-value strategic work that drives the organization forward.
The benefits extend far beyond immediate cost savings. With consistent standards, organizations can accelerate onboarding for new team members, improve data governance by having a single authoritative source, enhance collaboration as teams work from a shared vocabulary, and reduce the complexity of audits and compliance activities. Most importantly, Global Standards helps organizations avoid the normalization of inefficiency that plagues many enterprise data initiatives.
If you haven’t already explored Global Standards as part of SqlDBM’s Global Modeling suite, now is the time to evaluate how this feature can transform your organization’s approach to data modeling. The question isn’t whether your organization can afford to implement Global Standards—it’s whether you can afford not to. In an era where data drives competitive advantage, the organizations that standardize effectively will be the ones that thrive.
If you’d like to find out more about Global Standards and the rest of SqlDBM’s Global Modeling suite, get in touch!
