CHAPTER 2

ER/Studio Functionality

Go – Give it a Try

ER/Studio

A powerful tool

In this chapter, we introduce you to ER/Studio Data Architect (often shortened to “ER/Studio”, which is the term we will use in this book). Learn what ER/Studio can do, and how to install and start the software. ER/Studio is a data modeling tool for eliciting, representing, and reporting on data requirements, and for designing and describing databases. We will learn how to leverage ER/Studio functionality, which will allow you to build applications with greater accuracy and success, increase the use of data standards, and enhance collaboration within your organization. ER/Studio offers:

·          Model-driven design environment

·          Complete database life cycle support

·          Enterprise model management

·          Data lineage documentation

·          Enterprise communication capabilities

·          Data warehouse and integration support

·          Quality database designs.

ER/Studio XE3 contains a number of software development productivity tools including ER/Studio. ER/Studio XE3 is a powerful modeling and architecture solution that combines business, data, and application modeling into a multi-level design environment. Data, process, and software modeling interfaces allow business analysts and data architects to understand, design, and communicate software, data, and cross platform architectures across the organization for improved alignment between business and IT. In addition to ER/Studio, ER/Studio XE3 includes:

·          ER/Studio Business Architect. A process modeling tool that enables architects to document business processes. Business Architect enables companies to visualize, understand and refine the relationships between business processes and data as part of their enterprise architecture. Business Architect makes it easy to model how data is incorporated into business process by allowing users to both model and analyze the relationships between business processes and data. With this capability, data architects and business users can now come to a common understanding of the business. A shared repository between Data Architect and Business Architect editions means users can seamlessly model systems conceptually, logically, and physically in a collaborative and integrated environment.

·          ER/Studio Repository. A server-side model management system that solves the day-to-day challenges of modeling in a team environment, where model collaboration, versioning, security, and object reuse are vital. The Repository allows multiple users to be extremely productive while collaborating on data and business process modeling projects with real-time concurrent access that allows team members to share and re-use assets across projects. The Repository provides real-time data and business process collaboration for the enterprise. This collaborative working environment allows organizations to maintain compliance with business standards and mandatory regulations, while more effectively leveraging enterprise data as a corporate asset. The Repository also provides support for model version management, designed to allow organizations to easily manage all successive states of models and model metadata.

·          ER/Studio Portal. A web-based search and reporting tool used to access and query the Repository for improved understanding of metadata, object whereabouts, and data usage. The self-service Portal can be accessed via any web browser for cross-model and repository-wide data definitions and object searches. It brings enterprise-wide visibility to your reports and enable administrators to generate a model, dictionary, or data lineage business report, which frees up the lead architect’s time. Increased compliance with standards and regulations result because organizations can use the Portal to report and track sensitive data and metadata.

·          MetaWizard. Integrates metadata across modeling tools, business intelligence, ETL platforms and industry-standard exchange formats (XMI, XML and XSD). This tool enables ER/Studio to integrate with more than seventy other applications by sharing metadata through an import-export capability.

·          ER/Studio Software Architect. An object-oriented modeling tool for application architects to visually analyze and design complex software applications. Software Architect simplifies the design stage of a project by organizing and visualizing the requirements, subsystems, logical and physical elements, and structural and behavioral patterns of intensive software systems. It provides developers with powerful productivity facilities through pre-defined patterns, model audits and metrics for quality assurance, and project report documentation. Software Architect supports popular industry standards like OMG’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0 and Object Constraint Language (OCL), as well as providing XMI import/export options and exports to many other common formats.

·          Universal Data Models. Standard and industry data model templates for ER/Studio that reduce the development time of database-related projects by an average of 60 percent, as well as improve the quality of existing and new data models. There are nine standard data models, including Accounting, Orders, and Product, and seven industry data models, including Healthcare and Insurance.