Data flow diagram is a graphical representation of the flow of data through a system or process, often used by software engineers to visualize and communicate how data moves between different components. It's like a map that shows how data flows from input to output, with various stops along the way for processing, storage, and transformation - kind of like how your food delivery order flows from the restaurant to your door, with stops at the delivery app's servers and the driver's car.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was trying to explain to the new product manager how our backend systems work, but he kept getting confused, so I just drew a quick data flow diagram on the whiteboard and suddenly it all clicked for him.

• We were debugging an issue with our analytics pipeline and realized that the data flow diagram we had was totally outdated - no wonder it took us so long to figure out where the problem was!

If you actually want to learn more...

• Logical Architecture: Data Product as the Architectural Quantum: This article dives into the concept of a "data product" as the fundamental building block of a data mesh architecture, and how it encapsulates code, data, and infrastructure.

• The Next Enterprise Data Platform Architecture: This section explores how domain-driven design principles, self-service platforms, and product thinking can be applied to data architectures to move beyond monolithic data lakes.

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