Comment by ak39

Well said.

The exercise of comparmentalising and creating atomic islands of objects that dutifully encapsulate data becomes difficult during reassembly simply because we recreate the need for declarative style of accessing data in an imperative (OO) world. It's ye old object-relational impedance mismatch.

A (relational) data model is a single unit. It has to be seen this way. Creating imperative sub-structures (like encapsulating data into objects) breaks this paradigm with serious consequences when attempting to rejig the object-covered data into an on-demand style architecture. The whole model (database?) must be seen as a single design construct and all operations against the entire model must be sensitive to this notion - even if we access one table at a time. Yes, at specific times we may be interested in the contents of a single table or a few tables joined together declaratively for a particular use case, but the entire data model is a single atomic structure "at rest".

When paradigmatic lines like this are drawn, I side with the world-view that getting the data model "right" first is the way to go.

Fred Brooks and Linus Torvalds speak from experience in the trenches.