Backfill Discovery: Practical Data Modeling (Joe Reis)
Date: 2026-04-12 Source: practicaldatamodeling@substack.com Total messages found: 25 Unprocessed: 25 (none previously filed) Batch tasks created: 2
Overview
Joe Reis is serializing his book "Mixed Model Arts" (MMA) as chapters through the Practical Data Modeling Substack. The series advocates for a pragmatic, methodology-agnostic approach to data modeling -- moving beyond the Kimball vs. Inmon wars toward what Reis calls "Mixed Model Arts."
Book Structure: Mixed Model Arts (Book 1)
Pre-chapter / standalone articles
- Data Identity Politics and The Kimball vs. Inmon War (2025-12-31) -- sets up the "move beyond dogma" thesis
- What's Ahead - Alien Processes, Domains, and Data Models (2026-01-05) -- preview excerpt
- Modeling Business Processes and Domains (2026-01-09) -- Part 3 chapter
- Are the Levels of Data Modeling Outdated? (Redux) (2026-01-31)
- Data Modeling is Dead (Again), 2026 Edition. Part 2 (2026-02-04)
- The Organizational Dynamics and Politics of Data Modeling (2026-02-04)
- The Organizational Crisis in Data Modeling: Why 89% of Engineers Are Struggling (2026-02-20) -- survey data, 89% stat
Serialized chapters (Mixed Model Arts)
| Ch | Date | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (excerpt) | 2026-02-17 | Mixed Model Arts |
| 1 (full) | 2026-02-18 | The Era of the Mixed Model Artist |
| 2 (revised) | 2026-02-23 | What Data Modeling is and is Not |
| 3 | 2026-02-25 | No Free Lunch: The Debt, The Excuses, and The Reality of Data Modeling |
| 4 | 2026-03-02 | Beyond Rows and Columns: The Five Forms of Data |
| 5 | 2026-03-04 | Entities, Instances, and Identifiers |
| 6 | 2026-03-08 | Attributes: Describing the Entity |
| 7 | 2026-03-12 | Relationships: Tying It Together |
| 8 | 2026-03-17 | Grain: Getting the Level Right |
| 9 | 2026-03-21 | Counting and Aggregation: Controlling the Grain |
| 10 | 2026-03-30 | Why Time Matters in Data Modeling |
| 11 | 2026-04-03 | Context, Intent, and Action: The Semantic Foundation |
| 12 | 2026-04-09 | Stringing Together the Building Blocks |
| 13 | 2026-04-12 | Seeing the Business |
Non-article messages (4)
Four subscriber chat thread notifications -- not substantive content, skip during processing.
Chapter Observations
- Publication cadence: roughly weekly, sometimes twice per week
- Progression arc: Ch 1-3 lay philosophical groundwork (why model, what it is, technical debt), Ch 4-6 cover structural primitives (data forms, entities, attributes), Ch 7-9 handle relationships and aggregation, Ch 10-13 move into temporal, semantic, compositional, and business-level modeling
- Book title: "Mixed Model Arts" (MMA) -- a deliberate martial-arts metaphor for combining modeling disciplines
- Key thesis: data modeling is not dead; the problem is organizational, not technical. Practitioners need fluency across methodologies rather than loyalty to one
- Sanity Check relevance: Ch 3 (technical debt), Ch 8-9 (grain/aggregation), and Ch 11 (semantic foundation) are the most likely to intersect with our audience's pain points