Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

Basic Concepts
Who this book is for

Data Architects, DBAs, Analysts and Designers rely on state-of-the-art Data Modeling Tools to facilitate and simplify their data Modeling efforts, while maximizing the use of their resources. The Power*Architect software allows these busy technical professionals to perform this most intricate part of their job in a fraction of the time.

SQL Power Group's Power*Architect is an innovative data modeling tool designed primarily for Data Warehouse and Data Mart design. It allows the designer to open multiple concurrent source Database connections, drag and drop source schemas, tables and columns into the data modeling playpen, and forward-engineer the resulting target database and its associated ETL template.

The Power*Architect is a user-friendly DW data modeling tool created by data warehouse designers, and has many features geared specifically for the data warehouse architect, including:

Power*Architect can open multiple source databases concurrently, even those from competing database vendors. Another key feature of the Power*Architect that sets it apart from other data modeling tools is that it remembers the origin of each column, and is capable of automatically generating the source-to-target data mappings.

Whether you're building or maintaining your Data Warehouse data model, the Power*Architect will provide you a complete view of all required database structures and will expedite every aspect of your data warehouse design.

We firmly believe you can...

Power*Architect is a versatile tool for the busy data warehousing practitioner.

Basic Concepts

Project - a Power*Architect project consists of a view of multiple databases; you can load and save a Project to work on it at leisure.

Driver - Most programs need a distinct driver program to communicated with each different type of database. Power*Architect uses Java-based drivers, which normally come from the database vendor in the form of "JAR" [1] files. You need to inform Power*Architect about each driver before you can use it; do this from the User Preferences panel, under JDBC Drivers (just click Add and browse to the Jar file for your driver). If you do not have the JDBC driver for a given database, you can usually obtain one from the database vendor. If that fails, you can find a directory of databases drivers on Sun's web site .

Playpen - This is the main area of the Power*Architect window, in which you manipulate tables and relationships. You can play here to your heart's content, knowing it will not be saved until you ask the program to save.



[1] Java Archive files; these are an extension to the file format used by PKZip/WinZip archives