Benefits of Modeling in ERwin

Regardless of the type of DBMS you use or which types of data models you wish to develop, modeling your database in ERwin has many benefits. The most obvious benefit is system documentation that can be used by database and application development staff to define system requirements and to communicate among themselves and to end-users.

A second benefit is to provide a clear picture of referential integrity constraints. Maintaining referential integrity is essential in the relational model where relationships are encoded implicitly.

A third benefit is the provision of a “logical” RDBMS-independent picture of your database that can be used by automated tools to generate RDBMSspecific information. Thus, you can use a single ERwin diagram to generates DB2 table schemas, as well as schemas for other relational DBMSs.

One of the primary benefits of data modeling with ERwin is the ease with which you will be able to produce a diagram summarizing the results of your data modeling efforts, and generate a database schema from that model.

18 ∙ Information Systems, Databases, and Models