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schema design

/ˈskiː.mə dɪˈzaɪn/ - n.

1 [colloq.] An afternoon of careful structure followed by two years of columns named after the ticket that demanded them.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The deliberate structuring of tables, columns, types, and relationships to represent a domain and serve its access patterns.

Filed

See also

data dictionaryA faithful description of the column named 'cust_status_2_final', whose meaning died with its author.
dimensional modelingDeciding what the business measures and what it measures by, then discovering nobody agrees on either.
normalizationStoring each fact exactly once so that no one can find it, then joining nine tables to prove it was there all along.
schema evolutionThe fossil record of the data model: every layer a column someone added and no one was ever allowed to remove.