Identify data formats

Data is a collection of facts such as numbers, descriptions, and observations used to record information. Data structures in which this data is organized often represent entities that are important to an organization (such as customers, products, sales orders, and so on). Each entity typically has one or more attributes, or characteristics (for example, a customer might have a name, an address, a phone number, and so on).

You can classify data as structured, semi-structured, or unstructured.

Structured data

Structured data is data that adheres to a fixed schema, so all of the data has the same fields or properties. Most commonly, the schema for structured data entities is tabular – in other words, the data is represented in one or more tables that consist of rows to represent each instance of a data entity, and columns to represent attributes of the entity. For example, the following image shows tabular data representations for Customer and Product entities.

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