Building Data Models

The chapters in this part explain how to model your data systems in PowerDesigner.

• Getting Started with Data Modeling
  A data model is a representation of the information consumed and produced by a system. Data modeling involves analyzing the data objects present in a system and the relationships between them. PowerDesigner® provides conceptual, logical, and physical data models to allow you to analyze and model your system at all levels of abstraction.
• Building Conceptual and Logical Diagrams
  The data models in this chapter allow you to model the semantic and logical structure of your system.
• Building Physical Diagrams
  A physical data diagram provides a graphical view of your database structure, and helps you analyze its tables (including their columns, indexes, and triggers), views, and procedures, and the references between them.
• Building Multidimensional Diagrams
  A multidimensional data diagram provides a graphical view of your datamart or data warehouse database, and helps you identify its facts, cubes and dimensions.
• Building Triggers and Procedures
  PowerDesigner provides support for modeling triggers and stored procedures.
• Building a Database Access Structure
  In this manual, we group within the concept of database access, the objects that are used to let database users carry out their jobs while preserving the privacy and integrity of the information within the database.
• Building Web Services
  Web services are applications stored on web servers that you can access remotely through standard web protocols (HTTP, SOAP) and data formats (HTML, XML...), whatever the systems and programming languages.
• Building a Physical Implementation
  In addition to modeling the logical structure of your data systems, you can use PowerDesigner to specify the physical environment to which the database will be deployed.