You Shall Not YOLO: Model Your Damn Data
October 20–23
I have been working with databases for 20 years. I have seen bad schemas in every company I have ever worked for. Not because the developers were incompetent. Because nobody gave them a framework. MERISE is a French methodology developed in the 1970s for industrial database modeling. It is almost unknown outside francophone countries. That is a mistake. Where ER diagrams produce drawings, MERISE produces conversations. The Conceptual Data Model is not a deliverable: it is a tool for extracting business rules from people who have never thought about them explicitly. Cardinalities force decisions. Relationships catch contradictions. Business stakeholders sign off before a single line of SQL is written. In this talk, I will walk you through the full MERISE stack, from MCD to MLD to MPD, using real examples from production systems. I will show why it catches design errors that ER diagrams miss, how it survives contact with non-technical stakeholders, and what it looks like to apply it on a modern Postgres project. You will leave with a concrete methodology you can use on your next project, and a very good reason to be annoyed that nobody taught you this earlier.
