Reusing Ipedo Views in Modeling Tools

Part two of Peter Spielvogel's post on using Ipedo with external modeling tools. Peter is Ipedo’s Director of Product Marketing - S.P.

In my last post, I discussed how to use a data modeling tool such as such as CA ERwin, Embarcadero ER/Studio, or IBM Rational Rose to build virtual tables in Ipedo.

Another situation that customers ask about is how to share the views they build in Ipedo with other architects that need to understand the relationship among tables and how disparate data sources are joined to one another.

Again, my colleague, Jamie Wang, Ipedo’s Director of Engineering, identified this straightforward process and trained me how to do it.

In this case too, Ipedo’s ability to behave like a relational database allows data modeling tools to reverse engineer the schema objects and relationships among them. Let’s see how this works.

 

For the purpose of this example, we have created a data model in Ipedo joining some human resources tables. The Ipedo Administrator console appears below.

 

Next, open your modeling software. In this case, we are using CA ERwin. Select the option to Reverse Engineer a database.

 

Select the options and which driver to use. We’ll choose to reverse engineer Ipedo’s Logical/Physical model and use the generic ODBC driver.

 

Choose what information from the database (Ipedo in this case) you want to extract. Since our interest is in reusing the view (model) we built in Ipedo, we want ERwin to reverse engineer everything - tables, column names, primary and foreign key relationships, etc.

Click next and the data model from Ipedo appears in ERwin. Now, you can reuse the information, annotate it according to your corporate guidelines, and combine it with other enterprise data models.

 

So, now you can do your bottom-up data integration using Ipedo, and share the data models with other applications using your favorite modeling tool.

 

Top-Down Modeling with Ipedo

Another guest post, this time by Peter Spielvogel, Director of Product Marketing - S.P.

We have recently been getting inquiries from customers about integrating Ipedo with their enterprise modeling tools such as CA ERwin, Embarcadero ER/Studio, or IBM Rational Rose.

This blog will address top-down modeling, in which an architect builds an enterprise data model using his or her favorite modeling tool and then uses the model to drive data integration in Ipedo.

I will deal with the other direction (build bottom-up model in Ipedo and then move into modeling tool for sharing and reuse) in a separate blog.

Thanks to Jamie Wang, Ipedo’s Director of Engineering, for figuring out the process and training me in how to use the modeling tools and connect the models to Ipedo.

The process was surprisingly simple. The key is that Ipedo looks, acts, and talks like a relational database, which is what these modeling tools are accustomed to connecting with. I’ll run through the steps below.

First, build a model in your modeling tool. In this case, we used CA ERwin.

 

 

Choose the Forward Engineer/Schema Generation option from the Tools menu.

 

 

For Ipedo, use the ODBC/Generic driver, version 3.0.

 

 

Enter your user name and password to access the Ipedo server.

 

 

Choose what options you want to build in Ipedo: Schemas, Tables, Columns, and Indexes.

 

 

Customize the DDL script that the modeling tool generates so it generates virtual tables in Ipedo rather than the physical tables it usually builds in a relational database.

 

 

Open Ipedo and see all the tables you modeled in ERwin. Even though the tables may have originated in different databases, they are now available to build Views that combine their information along with Web Services, spreadsheets, or other information sources. That’s the beauty of EII.

 

 

Yes, it really is that easy.

Next time, we’ll go in the opposite direction, building views in Ipedo and allowing the modeling tool to discover them and infer the relationships among tables.