Getting Started

Information Modelers, Data Modelers and Architects are responsible for creating models of an organization’s information that span multiple levels of abstraction, from conceptual through to logical and physical. The conceptual models are technology independent and can be used for discussions with business people and domain experts, allowing the basic concepts in the domain to be represented, discussed and agreed upon. The logical model elaborates the conceptual model, adding more detail and precision but is still typically technology neutral, allowing Information Analysts to discuss and agree on logical structures. The physical model applies technology specific data to the models and allows engineers to discuss and agree on technology decisions in preparation for generation to a target environment, such as a database management system.

Selecting the Perspective

Enterprise Architect partitions the tool's extensive features into Perspectives, which ensures that you can focus on a specific task and work with the tools you need without the distraction of other features. To work with the Data Modeling features you first need to select one of these Perspectives:

<perspective name> > Database Engineering > Database Engineering

<perspective name> > Database Engineering > Entity Relationships

Setting the Perspective ensures that the Case Management Model and Notation diagrams, their tool boxes and other features of the Perspective will be available by default.

Example Diagram

An example diagram provides a visual introduction to the topic and allows you to see some of the important elements and connectors that are created in specifying or describing the way a data model is defined including: Tables, Views, Procedures, Sequences, Functions.

Data Model Types

Information can be modeled at a number of level of abstraction starting with a conceptual model that is typically created by or for business people, a Logical model which is used by business and systems analysts and a physical model which is the concern of the technologists such as database engineers. In this topic you will learn how to manage all three levels of information models.

Creating and Managing Data Models

In this topic you will learn how to work in detail using Enterprise Architect to manage your Physical Database schema. This includes the use of the Database Builder tool which allows you to interact with any number of live database through an ODBC connection.

Import Database Schema

This topic will show you how to connect to a live database including Production, Test and Development systems and reverse engineer the database into a model creating Tables, Views, Procedures, Declarative Referential Integrity and more. A diagram of the database is automatically created and the elements such as tables can be related to other elements in the model including Conceptual and Logical Models, Programming classes tests and more.

Generate Database Definition Language (DDL)

In this topic you will learn how to harness the power of the data models by generating Database Definition Language code directly from the model. Enterprise Architect can generate code into a wide range of Database Management systems.

Supported Database Management Systems

Enterprise Architect has rich support for most of the main stream Database Management Systems (DBMS). This feature allows models from disparate systems to be compared either for code generation or for analysis by using the import feature. This topic lists the supported DBMS and

More Information

This section provides useful links to other topics and resources that you might find useful when working with the Data Modeling tool features.