While three departments argued about column names,

IT built the thing anyway.

It passed the audit. Barely.

Barely is enough.

Day 87. Three days before re-audit.

In Conference Room B, the departments were in a meeting

about whether the report should show defect count or defect rate.

This meeting had been running, in various forms,

for eleven days.

Oran was not in the meeting.

He was in the server room

with his two developers —

Marcus, who knew SQL,

and Kevin, who was very enthusiastic —

and a whiteboard

covered in three tables.

Three tables, Oran had said on Day 60.

That's all we're building.

Everything else is a column.

The design.

The problem with every schema they had tried

was the same problem:

it assumed the data had a fixed shape.

Fixed columns. Fixed relationships.…