/ SECRET SPICE - PowerDesigner SerieS

Tips and tricks for PowerDesigner

In loose order I report here about my gain of knowledge with the data modeling tool PowerDesigner. For myself, this series is a kind of diary, a knowledge base and the 'Secret Spice', in which I record my discoveries, my tips and tricks around PowerDesigner documented for myself: For problems of or with PowerDesigner that I had while working on data modeling tasks.

So don't expect any news here about the data modeling tool PowerDesigner itself.

Of course, and as always, from my personal point of view or from the point of view of one of the team members of the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE) at my favorite customer: FastChangeCo!

FastChangeCoTM's data modelers keep experiencing the problem of lost mappings from views to tables in PowerDesigner.

PowerDesigner is currently only available for the Windows operating system. So far, so familiar. Amal Leyla Qasim, a data modeler on the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE) team, has set her sights on switching her workstation to an Apple MacBook Air.

In several projects, FastChangeCo's data modelers on the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE) team had an issue with the way PowerDesigner generates comments for tables and columns for the SQL Server database. Xuefang Kaya (one of the data modelers on the team), asked about the problems, says to the DMCE team:

At FastChangeCo, the data modelers within the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE) team are constantly designing new database objects to store data. One of the data modelers on the team is Xuefang Kaya. When she takes a new user story/task, she usually models multiple tables, their columns, and specifies a data type for each column.

PowerDesigner offers the possibility to edit the properties for a database in the so-called DBMS resource files. The DMBS resource files contain all information for PowerDesigner to generate DDL, DML and other SQL artifacts. For many databases, there are pre-built, included DBMS resource files for the different database versions.