What is PowerDesigner?
PowerDesigner is a graphical and easy-to-use enterprise modeling environment which provides:
- Integrated modeling through standard methodologies and notations: Data (E/R, Merise) Business (BPMN, BPEL, ebXML) Application (UML)
- Automatic code generation through customizable templates: SQL (with more than 50 supported DBMSs) Java.NET
- Powerful reverse engineering capabilities to document and update existing systems
- A scalable enterprise repository solution with strong security and versioning capabilities to aid multi-user development
- Automated, customizable reporting capabilities
- An extensible environment, permitting you to add new rules, commands, concepts and attributes to your modeling and coding methodologies
Modeling with PowerDesigner
PowerDesigner provides a unique set of enterprise modeling tools that bring together the standard techniques and notations of Business Process Modeling, Data Modeling and UML application modeling with other powerful features to assist you in analyzing, designing, building, and maintaining your applications, using software engineering best practices.
The PowerDesigner enterprise modeling solution enables you to closely integrate the design and maintenance of your application's core data layers with your project requirements, business processes, OO code, XML vocabularies, and database replication information. By providing you with a comprehensive set of models at all levels of abstraction, PowerDesigner helps you broaden the reach of your iterative design process to all aspects of your system architecture, from conception to deployment, and beyond.
PowerDesigner does not impose any particular software engineering methodology or process. Each company can implement its own workflow, defining responsibilities and roles, describing what tools to use, what validations are required, and what documents to produce at each step in the process.
A development team will comprise multiple user roles, including business analysts, analysts and designers, database administrators, developers, and testers, each of whom will use a different combination of PowerDesigner components.
Enterprise Modeling
PowerDesigner's sophisticated inter-model and code and database generation capabilities allow you to keep all your models and applications in synch while providing you with control over each and every modification.
When designing a database, the design process normally starts at the conceptual level. At the conceptual level, you do not need to consider the details of actual physical implementation.
A CDM represents the overall logical structure of a database, which is independent of any software or data storage structure. A conceptual model often contains data objects not yet implemented in the physical database. It gives a formal representation of the data needed to run an enterprise or a business activity.
CDM roles
The CDM allows you to:
- Represent the organization of data in a graphic format to create Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD)
- Verify the validity of data design
- Generate a Physical Data Model (PDM), which specifies the physical implementation of the database
- Generate an Object-Oriented Model (OOM), which specifies an object representation of the CDM using the UML standard
- Generate a Conceptual Data Model (CDM), to create another model version in order to represent different design stages
Logical model
The logical model allows you to design the database structure and perform some database denormalization actions.
In PowerDesigner, you design a logical model using a PDM with the <Logical Model> DBMS. This PDM is a physical model with standard objects, and without DBMS specific physical options and generation capabilities.
The PDM is a database design tool for defining the implementation of physical structures and data queries. Depending on the type of database you want to design, you will use different types of diagrams in the PDM. Database Diagram Operational Physical diagram to define the physical implementation of the database. Date warehouse or Data mart Physical diagram to store business data.
The physical diagrams of the PDM are used to design the structure of a database handling large amounts of operational data. Usually, the physical analysis follows the conceptual analysis in data modeling. At the physical stage, the designer considers the details of actual physical implementation of data in a database.
Since operational data are highly volatile and likely to be modified regularly, the database should be designed to accelerate data access and retrieval.
The physical diagrams of the PDM allow to take into account both software or data storage structures to suit your performance and physical constraints.