How Galen College Uses Modeling as a Competitive Advantage

When Galen College onboarded SqlDBM, they were able to quickly extract value from the product. Previously, their data team did not officially use any relational database modeling software, resulting in database architecture ambiguity and technical debt. For Jacob DeMoor, the team’s Data Warehouse Lead, it was paramount that his team at least start to adopt modeling. He views the database model as a “architecture map of a given system”.

His demands of the software were simple: it should be technical enough that it grasps the full level of detail required, it should offer features that accelerate the speed of engineering work, and it should allow for the model to be easily shared with collaborators and consumers. SqlDBM met all three criteria.

The onboarding was swift, as Jacob was able to quickly reverse engineer one of the college’s key student information databases. At that point, he gained a full view of the current schema and quickly started optimizing it. The tool then let Jacob go one step further by facilitating the schema deployment process via forward engineering.