title: How to classify data to different categories with their purpose in ERP Applications?
body: <p>all</p>
  
  <p>I am recently pondering that how to classify data into different categories in Erp solutions, basing on that, I can decide which data should I strip out and put it into a shared database for multiple tenants instances.</p>
  
  <p>As a industry practice, the Erp product is separated into 2 layers. The technology platform layer provide a lot of reusable components and modeling tools, make business applications follow the consistent architecture, the business application layer witch based on it provide the business functions.</p>
  
  <p>So, basically the data can be categorized into 2 main types.one is platform data, the other is business data.Further，the platform data can be categorized into sub categories:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>platform
  1)environment
  2)engine related(Form engine, workflow engine, data access engine...which make the business function work) 
  3)metadata(for example:Form Description,Business Object Description, Data Model, Workflow definition)
  4)configurations(organization or user related configurations)
  5)management related(data structures for manage the models)</li>
  <li>business
  1)model instances(actual orders data)
  2)business configurations
  3)derived data(from model instance data, and form query or analysis)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>After analysis, I found that the environment data, configurations, management related data, business data are in a high degree of coupling. The only category can be separated from the instance database is the metadata.</p>
  
  <p>1.Does my analysis reasonable?
  2.Are there any patterns for reference?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>