It sounds like your boss might be micromanaging. He should not be responsible for defining your data model; he hired you to worry about that. The only thing he

It sounds like your boss might be micromanaging. He should not be responsible for defining your data model; he hired you to worry about that. The only thing he should be concerned with is the business requirements, for example, which queries have business value? What queries might we want to make in the future? It's good he's thinking about the data model, but he's introducing meaningless friction in your relationship by effectively requiring this additional communications step. You could spend that time coding. In this example, your contract with him is to deliver a data model that optimizes for business requirements, minimizes cost, and maximizes speed. All those variables affect the data model, since you obviously need to consider tradeoffs when designing schemas or creating indices. You have the expertise to make decisions about these tradeoffs. Your boss only has expertise on the business requirements. So why would he try to optimize the data model himself if he is only considering a subset of the variables? He needs to trust you for your expertise and remember why he hired you, IMO.