Question

What is a data dictionary? How is it useful and to whom? When should you consider including one in a project?

Answer 1

Internet is all about data and one should never ignore or neglect the importance of data while building applications.

Now questions is what is data dictionary? Before that, let's understand what is dictionary. What's there inside a dictionary? Obviously the data, words, information, meanings, pronounciation and a few other things.

Similar to this, a data dictionary holds information about various kind words and it's meaning, relationship with data, from where it is orignated and it's usage and format. There are many big companies that provides this data dictionary, some are freely available while some are paid, IBM is one of the company that provides this kind of dictionary.

How it is useful?

When it becomes to software, think of this dictionary as your database that holds all the information about your application and generally he user don't have a access to it, all they have is the access to their own data but not others.

As you know, the importance of database in the software, without it the application never works, it's all about data and without a database, a website can't be interactive and useful anymore.

The primary use of data dictionary is the provide the content for the application in such a way that it's can make the best use out of it.
It avoids data inconsistency.

Why you should use data dictionary in your project?

As I mentioned, it helps to maintain the consistency across your project or application. There are other benfits as well such that it becomes easier to analyse and study the data and retrieve it in a faster way when your data is interconnected with many other data.

I hope this helps.