Data modeling Tips for the newbie

What Tips can we advise a newbie on data modeling?

Here are some simple advices

Create and plan your Data Warehouse, Data Structure and Architecture

1. Scope and Plan your data. Data architecture is relevant for you to plan way ahead of data troubles such as data integrity and compatibility issues. Plan what files you will be dealing with like flat files to cubes.
2. Have a background in Statistics. Knowing a little bit of your normal curves, testing for normal distributions will do help but you have to keep on reading for complex models such as Neural Networks and Bayesian Networks.
3. Know a little bit of scripting, learning SQL can help in extracting, transforming and loading your data, ETL would be a good way to go, a little bit of select statements such as "select from table where customerid = 200"
4. know your business objectives, do you want models that you can use to have leverage over your competitors, or do you want customer relationship management
5. Lastly, execute your model, your boss would be happy if you are able to deploy your complex model and show it to the board of trustees. 

Overall, data mining is not as simple as it seem but at least you can get pointers from these :)

Happy DAta Mining!