February 3, 2015 Posted in Blogs

ERWin is a long term standard database modeling tool for building up ERD. Usually data architect spends lots of time on handling the relationships among entities, then utilizes forward engineering function to generate database schema.

During database modeling practices, an outstanding issue has been noticed that some of our clients made mistakes in transaction design. All the transactions of all kinds of activities are kept in one transaction table, with fields createdby, createdon, createdusing, modifiedby, modifiedon and modifiedusing, etc. Initially, the system might work properly. But with time goes, e.g., after 3 years, the transaction table is very likely occupies more than half of the disk spaces of the entire database...

December 23, 2014 Posted in Blogs

Our utility client has a large site with numerous sub-sites that need to be migrated to a new million dollars WCM (Web Content Management) based system. The new site is based on Adobe CQ* which is a neat WCM system.

The problem is the migration can’t be done in one day. In a large organization, the way it works is to migrate sub-sites one by one. The procedure can take a few months or longer. So we need to bridge the legacy site and new one to help on seamless migration. When user accesses the site, user may access the bookmarks or favorite links that they stored in their browsers. Those bookmarks still point to legacy sites even there are newly migrated sites available. What we need do is to find the match in between and redirect the legacy URLs to the new one running on new WCM system.

December 21, 2014 Posted in Blogs

One of our utility clients uses MS Visio as its logical data modeling tool. MS Visio is designed as a drawing tool,not as a professional data modeling tool by Microsoft official statement. To create DDL from MS Visio diagram is not straightforward; usually it takes lots of efforts.

We prefer to use UML modeling instead of ERD modeling. Since to adopt object-oriented design in database field is better aligned with object-oriented application design. In order to achieve this goal, we did some research on quite a few tools in the market, and we found Visual Paradigm is an ideal UML modeling tool in data architectural design.

Below is a case study regarding how we transit client’s data model from Visio to Visual Paradigm in their data warehouse project, and how we utilize Visual Paradigm in...