Database Modeling & Design Fourth Edition- P45: Database technology has evolved rapidly in the three decades since the rise and eventual dominance of relational database systems. While many specialized database systems (object-oriented, spatial, multimedia, etc.) have found substantial user communities in the science and engineering fields, relational systems remain the dominant database technology for business enterprises. | Modeling a Data Warehouse 207 models UML business process models and semi-structured data using extensible Markup Language XML . Notice in Figure how the fourth page which contains graphics can be oriented in landscape mode while the remaining pages are kept in portrait mode. AllFusion ERwin and Rational Data Architect also provide rich reporting features though Sybase PowerDesigner has the richest capabilities. Modeling a Data Warehouse In Chapter 8 we discussed the unique design considerations required for data warehousing and decision support. Typically warehouses are designed to support complex queries that provide analytic analysis of your data. As such they exploit different schema topology models such as star schema and horizontal partitioning. They typically exploit data views and materialized data views data aggregation and multidimensional modeling far more extensively than other operational and transactional databases. Traditionally warehouses have been populated with data that is extracted and transformed from other operational databases. However more and more companies are moving to consolidate system resources and provide real-time analytics by either feeding warehouses data in near-real-time . with a few minutes latency or entirely merging their transactional data stores with their analytic warehouses into a single server or cluster. These trends are known as active data warehousing and pose even more complex design challenges. There is a vast need for CASE tooling in this space. Sybase offers a CASE tool known as Sybase Industry Warehouse Studio IWS . Sybase IWS is really a set of industry-specific prepackaged warehouses that require some limited customization. Sybase IWS tooling provides a set of wizards for designing star schemas dimensional tables denormalization summarization and partitioning as usual the Sybase tools are strong on reporting facilities. The industry domains covered by ISW are fairly reasonable they include IWS
