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title: EFFICIENT DATA STRUCTURES ON CERAMIC.

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# EFFICIENT DATA STRUCTURES ON CERAMIC.

Ceramic is a decentralized data network that brings unlimited data composability to Web3 applications.  It allows users to be able to own their data and use the same data in different applications, unlike centralized platforms where you need to always fill in your information over and over again.

This article will explain the ceramic data layer and how data is efficiently stored on the ceramic network.


## Table of Contents

* Decentralized Data
* Data Composability
* Data Models
* Data Storage
* Data Stream


## Decentralized Data

Data stored on the ceramic network are decentralized, the ceramic protocol consists of a network of nodes, and application developers need to connect their client to any of the nodes in other to start building. The data stored on these nodes can only be updated by the user who created the data, the ceramic network provides a service where users are in charge of their data, and they carry the data from one application to another application and the application reads the data from the user. The ceramic network also provides a user identity that is tied to the user's data. The application developer can focus on user experience instead of maintaining user data. 


## Data Composability

Data stored on ceramic are structured in such a way that data sharing is reusable by different applications. The ceramic network uses Data models to make this possible, these data models are data structures that can be used in different applications, and different data models can also be combined to create new models and build new applications.


## Data Models

Data models are a standard way to store groups of related data, just like we have tables in traditional databases, we have data models in ceramic, examples of data models are a user profile, a blog, a social graph, user identity, and others. They are the basics for building applications on ceramic. Data models can be easily defined and shared and reused in the ceramic network and as the creation of data models increases, it will open up the possibilities for more applications.


## Data Storage

Storing data on the blockchain is very expensive and is not sustainable, the ceramic network offers a decentralized network where users can store their data without fear of censorship or data loss, each data on the ceramic network is added to an append-only list called stream. Each stream is tied to the user's identity. The ceramic network is capable of storing, updating, and retrieving data from the data models. All data updates on Ceramic are cryptographically verifiable and can provide audibility throughout all historical versions of a piece of data that has changed over time.


## Data Stream

Data added to the ceramic network are known as streams, and they are added to the data models, a similar example would be adding data to already created tables in a traditional database. We can say data models are like tables and streams are the data we are adding to the table. It is important to note that data models are not specific to an application, they can be reused by a different application.


## Conclusion

The ceramic data network is one of the solutions to the blockchain data storage problems and ceramic takes an additional step by allowing users to own and control their data.

I hope you found this article useful.
 
Thank you for reading.

