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Data Modeling Tools

Design, deploy and understand complex business and technical data structures

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Data modeling has always been the best way to understand complex data sources and automate design standards and integrity rules. Today, the role of data modeling has expanded as the central point of collaboration between data generators, stewards and consumers. That’s because data modeling is the best way to visualize metadata, and metadata is now the heart of enterprise data management, as well as data governance and intelligence efforts.

What Is a Data Model?

A data model is a visual representation of data elements and the relationships between them. Data models help business and technical resources collaborate in the design of information systems and the databases that power them. They show what data is required and how it needs to be structured to support various business processes.

There are three basic types of data models, each with a specific purpose:

  • Conceptual Data Models: High-level, static business structures and concepts
  • Logical Data Models: Entity types, data attributes and relationships between entities
  • Physical Data Models: The internal schema database design

What Is Data Modeling?

Data modeling is the process of creating a data model to communicate data requirements, documenting data structures and entity types. It serves as a visual guide in designing and deploying databases with high-quality data sources as part of application development.

Data modeling has been used for decades to help organizations define and categorize their data, establishing standards and rules so it can be consumed and then used by information systems. Today, data modeling provides even greater value because critical data exists in both structured and unstructured formats and lives both on premise and in the cloud. So it’s a cost-effective and efficient way to manage and govern massive volumes of data, aligning data assets with the business functions they serve. You can automatically generate data models and database designs to increase efficiency and reduce errors to make the lives or your data modelers – and other stakeholders – much more productive.

Benefits of Data Modeling

You can’t manage what you can’t see. That’s why data modeling is a critical component of metadata management, data governance and data intelligence. It provides an integrated view of conceptual, logical and physical data models to help business and IT stakeholders understand data structures and their meaning. Data modeling is the first step to ensuring mission-critical information is used, understood and trusted across the enterprise. The primary benefits of data modeling software are the abilities to:

Discover, standardize and document existing data sources

Design and deploy high-quality data sources across disparate platforms

Visually compare, analyze and synchronize data models with deployed data assets

Support expanding regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and CCPA

Empower employees with self-service
access for enterprise data capability, literacy and accountability

Govern data modeling teams, processes, portfolios and lifecycle to support expanding regulatory requirements

Author and integrate active data governance constructs, metadata configurations and stakeholder feedback to simplify collaboration across key roles and improve alignment

Improve business processes for operational efficiency

Data modeling tools have proved that if you take the time and make the investment upfront, you avoid the pain of costly mistakes further along in the development process. So the data model is a low-risk, low-cost capability that supports many use cases, including:

  • Database design and deployment with schema maintenance
  • Master data management and data integration
  • Metadata management
  • Analytics/business Intelligence design and data source analysis
  • Data warehouse and data lake design/documentation
  • Big Data adoption
  • DBMS rationalization and migration
  • Data governance
  • Data intelligence

Why erwin’s Data Modeling Software?

erwin pioneered data modeling and has been working with the world’s largest enterprises for more than 30 years to help them realize its advantages. erwin Data Modeler (erwin DM) remains the most trusted software for data modeling and database design, automating complex and time-consuming tasks related to data source discovery, design, documentation, standardization and deployment.

We’ve developed what we believe to be the best data modeler with customer input, ensuring all our functionality, workflows and support help the professional data modeler in producing the desired business outcomes. With erwin DM, you can model any data from anywhere to:

  • Visualize business and technical database structures in an integrated model rich in metadata
  • Standardize and reuse core definitions and data structures across projects with the data model and associated metadata stored in a central repository
  • Store business definitions and data-centric business rules in the model along with technical database schemas, procedures and other information
  • Extract and convert data from ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications
  • Rationalize platform inconsistencies and deliver a single source of truth for all enterprise business data
  • Give business users confidence in the information they use to make decisions

Additionally, erwin DM is part of the larger erwin EDGE platform that integrates enterprise architecture and business process modeling with data catalog and data literacy capabilities.

If you’ve got data, then you need data modeling to see and understand all your enterprise data assets. Use erwin DM to reduce complexity and promote enterprise data literacy, collaboration and accountability.

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Helpful Resources

White Paper

Drive Business Value
and Underpin Governance
with an Enterprise Data Model

PDF

E-book

Application Development Is New Again

PDF

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