Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture With SAP PowerDesigner Software

Transcription

1 SAP Technology Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture With SAP PowerDesigner Software

2 Table of Contents 4 Seeing the Big Picture with a 360-Degree View Gaining Efficiencies with SAP PowerDesigner Additional Features and Benefits Supported Modeling Techniques Putting It All Together Find Out More

3 SAP PowerDesigner software is a leading modeling tool that helps you to improve your business intelligence (BI) and information architecture. Using metadata management, the software benefits your data governance, BI, data integration, and data consolidation efforts because it establishes a 360-degree view of your key information assets. Enterprise-wide impact analysis functionality helps reduce the time, risks, and costs associated with changes throughout your information architecture. Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture 3

4 EMPOWER YOUR USERS WITH A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR IT AND BUSINESS Seeing the Big Picture with a 360-Degree View GAINING EFFICIENCIES WITH SAP PowerDesigner SAP PowerDesigner has become a standard modeling tool for many organizations worldwide. With our proven commitment to innovations in data, information, and business modeling, SAP PowerDesigner is a safe choice for all your modeling environments. At SAP, we ve emphasized ease of use for SAP PowerDesigner. Using a Microsoft Windows motif, the software s highly customizable, graphical user interface makes it easy for your users to perform common tasks while empowering your advanced users with rapid access to all features. Additionally, with its robust modeling functionality, SAP PowerDesigner helps you to visualize, analyze, and manipulate metadata to streamline communication and collaboration between business and IT. The software supports the following key benefits, helping you to: Align business and IT Obtain business and IT alignment and team collaboration with our link and sync technology by creating connections between requirements, business language, and data models Improve team productivity Give your developers a teamsharing environment with a secure metadata repository for all modeling types Document your existing systems Foster greater enterprise collaboration through flexible, wizard-driven documentation and Web-based reporting Support open software environments Improve your understanding of heterogeneous systems with support for leading XML, database, and process language standards within a single tool and framework; over 80 relational database management system (RDBMS) definitions are supported Enforce standards Enforce corporate or regulatory standards and practices through embedded Visual Basic scripting, a fully scriptable interface, a customizable metamodel, and a fully documented application programming interface Reduce the impact of change Use our multimodel impact analysis to reduce the time and cost of implementing changes throughout your enterprise; integration of your requirements, analysis models, business models, and data models provides a comprehensive understanding of the changes ADDITIONAL FEATURES AND BENEFITS SAP PowerDesigner offers a range of features to help you manage the flow of information between business and IT in a single tool and to minimize the time, risk, and cost of changes to your information architecture. Key features include: Customization Along with its highly customizable interface, you can optimize productivity by controlling everything from the user interface to the way the software manages modeling tasks and generates code. Requirements management Detailed requirements analysis links to all models for traceability; import and synchronization with Microsoft Word places your users directly into the analysis and design lifecycle. Document generation Wizard-driven lists, multimodel documents, and fully hyperlinked Web reporting give your nonmodeling users secure, controlled access to metadata while fostering greater communication among all members of your project team. Impact analysis Models are fully integrated using our link and sync technology, tying all model types together for complete enterprise-wide or projectwide impact analysis and streamlining communication and collaboration to dramatically increase your entire organization s responsiveness to change. Information mapping Our drag-and-drop mapping editor allows for easy, fast, and accurate documentation of dependencies; you can simply drag to or from any supported source to target model pairs and create comprehensive mapping definitions used in data dictionary definitions, impact analysis, and warehouse extract, transform, and load (ETL) documentation. Metadata sharing Using the software s portal, your users have full thin-client access to all authorized (by role-based security) metadata, including graphics and full element definitions and descriptions. With our portal composer license, your users also can make edits to certain metadata directly through the Web interface, allowing for greater participation among a broader community and fostering a more collaborative atmosphere. 4 Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture

5 Enterprise repository The software s fully integrated design-time repository, hosted by popular relational databases, is a highly scalable, centralized metadata management utility that enables role-based security on models and submodels, version control, configuration management, version compare, impact analysis, and comprehensive search functionality. The repository helps ensure that all of your users have the latest metadata available, can take appropriate actions based on changes committed to the server, and share a single version of the truth. Enterprise glossary SAP PowerDesigner lets you define your business terms and categories, complete with aliases, to fully align data models with your business language. It enforces the management of naming conventions throughout all models to ensure consistent naming standards, business language alignment, and support for data stewardship and governance efforts. Figure 1: Conceptual Data Modeling SUPPORTED MODELING TECHNIQUES SAP PowerDesigner supports a wide range of modeling techniques, which are described below and depicted in Figures 1 through 8. Conceptual Data Modeling Conceptual data models based on Information Engineering (IE), Barker, or IDEF1X notation provide a database and technology independent business representation of data concepts and core relationships. Conceptual data models iteratively generate into one or more logical and physical data models based on desired levels of abstraction and approaches to information architecture from a common business view. See Figure 1. Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture 5

6 Logical Data Modeling Logical data models that are based on IE, Barker, or IDEF1X notation provide database-independent relational structures for use by developers and designers for optimization and understanding. Figure 2: Logical Data Modeling Logical data models can be developed independently or generated from conceptual data models. Logical data models can generate to one or more physical data models. See Figure 2. SAP PowerDesigner helps you to visualize, analyze, and manipulate metadata to streamline communication and collaboration between business and IT. 6 Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture

7 Physical Data Modeling Physical data models based on IE or IDEF1X notation let you document, generate, and reverse-engineer structures for over 80 RDBMS (including the latest from SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, NCR Teradata, MySQL, and more). Support includes database artifacts and advanced techniques such as Java, XML, and Web services in the database; security modeling; specialized handling of views; and more. See Figure 3. Figure 3: Physical Data Modeling Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture 7

8 Data Warehouse Modeling Multidimensional diagrams document the online analytical processing environments by representing cubes, facts, dimensions, dimensional hierarchies, and queries independent of the physical table structures used to store the warehouse or data mart information. Figure 4: Data Warehouse Modeling The data mapping editor links the source definition, warehouse, mart, and reporting environment together. This provides for clear impact analysis and design-time change management of the BI environment. See Figure 4. SAP PowerDesigner offers a range of features to help you manage the flow of information between business and IT in a single tool and to minimize the time, risk, and cost of changes to your information architecture. 8 Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture

9 XML Modeling XML models support canonical data models and physical XML structure definitions. The XML models generate or reverseengineer structures for document-type-definition markup language and schemas. These models are mapped to data models to document XML and relational mappings as well as for definitions of XML in the database for RDBMS engines that support this concept. See Figure 5. Figure 5: XML Modeling Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture 9

10 Enterprise Glossary Centrally managed by the enterprise repository, the enterprise glossary helps ensure that business terms and definitions are established and consistently managed throughout all models. This enforces consistent naming standards and business language alignment and supports data stewardship and governance efforts. Data Movement Modeling Exclusive to SAP PowerDesigner, the data movement model documents all aspects of information movement. Source-data stores, target-data stores, multiple transformations, publications, and subscriptions serve to document any ETL, enterprise information integration, or replication process. See Figure 7. When used in parallel with the enterprise glossary, the conceptual data model in SAP PowerDesigner provides a true data dictionary. It streamlines communication by ensuring everyone is speaking the same language. See Figure 6. Figure 6: Enterprise Glossary Figure 7: Data Movement Modeling 10 Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture

11 PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER SAP PowerDesigner supports a comprehensive set of data modeling techniques. The software helps business and IT to speak the same language, enabling better communication and alignment between the two. Additionally, the software gives you strong support for your data governance, BI, data integration, and data consolidation efforts. See Figure 8 for a snapshot of all the models that are available to you with SAP PowerDesigner software. FIND OUT MORE To learn more about how SAP PowerDesigner software can help your organization, call your SAP representative today or visit us on the Web at /database/model-driven-architecture/index.epx. Figure 8: Data Modeling Techniques Supported by SAP PowerDesigner Software REPOSITORY Conceptual data model BPM Logical data model Requirements model Data movement model XML model Replication definition Physical data model XML DTD schema DDL RDBMS Forward engineering; Reverse engineering; Round-trip engineering; Import and export BPM = business process management; DTD = document-type-definition; DDL = data definition language Enabling Better Business Intelligence and Information Architecture 11

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