In many cases the data warehousing architect and the data
model designer are different people. Before you proceed, you need
to know if any physical data models already exist in your enterprise,
and if so, how they were created. Taking the time to understand the
location and format of existing data models can save you work.
Based
on this information, you can set up your environment in different
ways:
- If someone in your team already used the Design Studio to create
physical data models from scratch (native "SQL models"), you can reference
these models in your data warehousing projects. See Creating a data warehousing project.
- If you want a physical data model to be created for you automatically
based on a live database connection, select "online mode" when you
create your data flows and mining flows.
See Creating a data flow.
- If physical data models already exist but they are in a proprietary
format, such as ERwin, you can use the Design Studio to import these
models and transform them to the SQL model format.
- If no physical data models exist but you can connect to the live
data sources via the Data Source
Explorer or have access to the DDL scripts
that were used to create the data sources, you can reverse-engineer
the models that you need.