Reference: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.3/Knowledge/Aboutdatamodels Data models are collections of datasets that represent your data in a structured and hierarchical way. Data models define how your data is organized into objects and fields. Data models can be composed of one or more of the following datasets:
Events datasets: These are the base datasets that represent raw events in Splunk. Events datasets can be filtered by constraints, such as search terms, sourcetypes, indexes, etc.
Search datasets: These are derived datasets that represent the results of a search on events or other datasets.
Search datasets can use any search command, such as stats, eval, rex, etc., to transform the data.
Transaction datasets: These are derived datasets that represent groups of events that are related by fields, time, or both. Transaction datasets can use the transaction command or event types with transactiontype=true to create transactions.