🌾 Full Circle

It’s funny how things come full circle. Back in undergrad, Database Design and Modeling was one of my favorite classes — I loved the logic, the structure, and the creativity behind building relationships between tables. I didn’t realize then that I’d be revisiting those same concepts years later, this time through the lens of a working analyst.

Now, projects like The King’s Pantry let me bring that passion back to life, combining the fundamentals I first learned in the classroom with everything I’ve experienced in real-world ERP systems. It’s proof that even as our careers evolve, the subjects we once loved have a way of finding us again — just in more meaningful, applied ways.

Meet The King’s Pantry

A few weeks ago, I started building something new — a dataset inspired by the Game of Thrones universe, but modeled after real ERP systems I’ve worked with in retail and distribution.

Meet The King’s Pantry, a grocery market fit for the realm.

It’s more than a themed dataset, it’s a teaching tool designed to help analysts learn how to connect sales, products, vendors, and customers the way real business systems do.

the schema: where business logic meets design

Every dataset needs a solid foundation, and The King’s Pantry was designed with a structure that mirrors a real ERP system: simple enough for analysts to explore, yet realistic enough to teach key data relationships.

At its core, the schema includes five main tables that represent how business flows through the kingdom:

• Customer — Holds details about every buyer in the realm, from noble households to local merchants. Includes hierarchy fields that let you practice self-joins and account roll-ups.
• Vendor — Represents the suppliers (or noble houses) who provide goods to The King’s Pantry. Each vendor links to multiple products and includes a preferred vendor flag for analysis.
• Product — The heart of the operation. This table lists every item sold in the market (from fresh produce to imported sweets along with category taxonomy, pricing, and cost details).
• Sales Orders — Records transactions placed by customers. Each order includes details like customer ID, order date, payment method, and status, a perfect table for learning joins and date-based analysis.
• Sales Order Details — Breaks each order down into individual line items. This is where quantities, pricing, and margins live, allowing for analysis at the most granular level.

Together, these tables create a relational map that connects vendors → products → sales → customers, forming the foundation for everything from category dashboards to SQL query practice.

Coming This saturday: Power BI Tutorial

The first tutorial will walk through category and sales insights using The King’s Pantry dataset, designed in the same storytelling style as my Daily Grind Coffee dashboard.

We’ll build visualizations that mirror real-world category management dashboards while keeping the aesthetic of a Westerosi market.

Coming next Monday: SQL Tutorial

Next, I’ll release a SQL tutorial with hands-on exercises based on queries I actually used in my analyst roles (from calculating margins to joining vendor data through products and sales orders).

This will show how technical SQL joins and calculation translate into the insights that Power BI visualizes, connecting backend logic to business storytelling.

Why I Built This Project

I wanted to bridge the gap between creativity and real-world analytics, showing that learning SQL, database design, and data modeling doesn’t have to be dry.

By re-imagining ERP systems through a fantasy lens, I’m creating a way for analysts to practice with data that feels approachable, fun, and still grounded in real business logic.

Sneak Peek: The Next Launch

This first release focuses on the external stakeholders of the realm — customers, vendors, and marketplace sales.

In the next phase of The King’s Pantry, we’ll turn the focus inward — toward the internal stakeholders who keep the kingdom running.

That means expanding the dataset to include purchase orders, purchase order details, buylines, buyline branches, and more, reflecting how businesses manage inventory, procurement, and supply chain performance behind the scenes.

It’ll be a deeper dive into the full ERP cycle (from purchase to sale) and I can’t wait to build it piece by piece.

A Little Poetic, Isn’t It?

When I started my blog and LinkedIn, it was mainly to build a professional portfolio and presence. But somewhere along the way, it evolved into something I genuinely love — a space to create projects, resources, and tutorials to help others do the same.

I took the advice to “build a project to stand out to recruiters”… and ended up building a project to help others build their own.

Project inception? Maybe.

The Realm Awaits

Stay tuned — the first Power BI tutorial drops this Friday, followed by the SQL tutorial on Monday.

Because even in Westeros… data reigns supreme.

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