In this chapter, we saw examples of how to represent and work with complex and nested data in Scala. Obviously, it would be hard to cover all the cases as the world of unstructured data is much larger than the nice niche of structured row-by-row simplification of the real world and is still under construction. Pictures, music, and spoken and written language have a lot of nuances that are hard to capture in a flat representation.

While for ultimate data analysis, we eventually convert the datasets to the record-oriented flat representation, at least at the time of collection, one needs to be careful to store that data as it is and not throw away useful information that might be contained in data or metadata. Extending the databases and storage with a way to record this useful information is the first step. The next one is to use languages that can effectively analyze this information; which is definitely Scala.

In the next chapter we'll look at somewhat related topic of working with graphs, a specific example of non-structured data.