Basics
Understanding Schemas in Datastorms
Schemas are at the heart of Datastorms. They define the structure, meaning, and relationships within your data — making the platform highly flexible and scalable.
What Is a Schema?
A Schema represents a real-world concept or object. This can be anything, such as:
- A Person
- A Company
- A Document
- A Verification
- Even something physical, like a Chair
The end user will create later on individual records of a schema, we call them instances or objects.
There are three types of schema, each with a own behaviour:
- Regular schema (default use this one).
- Relational schema
- Interface schema
Every schema consists of one or more properties and one or more relations.
Properties
Each Schema contains properties — these describe the characteristics of the concept.
Examples of a schema are:
Schema: Person
- Name
- Date of Birth
- Age
Schema: Company
- Name
- Location
These properties define the fields you can later populate when creating individual instances.
Default a new schema has no properties. If a property is required, then it needs to be defined first.
Relations between Schemas
Schemas can be linked to each other through relations.
For example:
A “Person” works at a “Company”.
This relations allows you to express that:
Person X → works at → Company Y
Why is this useful?
- You maintain clarity across complex datasets.
- You reduce duplication by linking rather than repeating data.
- You can query and navigate data based on relations (e.g. “Show all people who work at Bob’s B.V.”)
Instances / objects of Schemas
While Schemas are defined in the settings, you create actual data entries — named instances or objects — in the application interface.
For example if you have a schema Person with properties Name, Date of Birth and Age:
| Name | Date of Birth | Age |
|---|---|---|
| Bob | 01/01/1980 | 43 |
And a schema Company with properties Name and Location:
| Name | Location |
|---|---|
| Bob’s B.V. | Zoetermeer |
If you have defined a relation between these two schema's name Person - works at - Company, then you are able to relate both instances/objects to each other:
Bob → works at → Bob’s B.V.