White Paper: MySQL Workbench: A Data Modeling Guide for Developers and DBAs
Versatile Tool for Creating and Modifying Corporate Databases
The 14-page White Paper, ‘MySQL Workbench: A Data Modeling Guide for Developers and DBAs‘, looks at the various types of data modern businesses need to manage, examines the reasons why a model-driven approach to data management is necessary, and outlines the benefits such an approach provides. It also highlights how the MySQL Workbench product from MySQL can be an indispensable aid in the hands of experienced data modelers, developers, and DBAs who are tasked with managing the complex data management infrastructure of a dynamic and growing business.
The paper enumerates and briefly describes the several kinds of data an entity can expect to handle. These include:
- Operational data: normally transactional processing data, stored in relational databases, that exists in the form of new/update customer orders and other data that supports the products and services that companies sell and support transactional data flows.
- Business Intelligence data: exists in the form of current and past operational data, stored in data warehouses or analytic data stores, that is being used to understand such things as customer purchasing trends and the impact of marketing programs. This data is separated from the operational data to improve system response times for those systems.
- Historical data: seldom accessed data that is kept primarily online to meet government or industry compliance regulations and that represents the historical activity of business systems or audit trails of data usage throughout an organization.
- Integration data: defines the process of how transactional data is transformed into business intelligence data and used to manage the flow of data from operational systems to analytic or historical data stores.
- Master data: equates to “reference data,” which does not depend on other data elements for its identity or meaning, and usually serves as consensus data that is shared consistently across systems.
- Metadata: “data about data” that serves as the definition point of data elements along with describing how they should be used.
- Unstructured data: typically handled in content management systems (although some are moving this into traditional RDBMS engines), to manage the evolutionary life cycle of digital information (video files, documents, etc.)
These various types of data are best managed, the paper contends by taking a model-driven approach to dealing with them, one that models the use and relationships of data that exist in the categories of data listed above. The widespread use of the model-driven approach is demonstrated in a graphic representation of a study conducted by IDC and InfoWorld.
Among the benefits cited in the paper for using the model driven management approach are the following, each of which is discussed in turn:
- Metadata management: ensures data consistency, enforces standards of data elements used throughout an organization, and assists in identifying and cataloging elements for data governance
- Rapid application delivery: reduces the time it takes to craft and implement a new physical data design and also the application that makes use of the underlying database
- Change management: helps to manage change between different iterations of data designs
- Packaged application management: removes the ‘black box’ feel of packaged applications by graphically rendering the heart of any application, which is the database.
- Reporting and communication: greatly simplifies the communication and reporting of new and modified data designs
- Performance management: helps to more quickly pinpoint design flaws in data designs that contribute to inefficient response times in actual data-driven systems
The paper then turns to a discussion of how MySQL Workbench can be applied by enterprises in the creation of new physical data models for MySQL databases and in the modification of existing databases, employing reverse/forward engineering and change management functions.
Aspects of the solution that are considered include database design, the application of forward and reverse engineering, change management, and reporting and documentation. The paper then turns to a tabulated listing of the features of MySQL Workbench.
MySQL Workbench, the paper concludes helps DBAs and developers both quickly create new MySQL databases and manage the lifecycle of existing MySQL databases with change management and reporting functions. Furthermore,with MySQL Workbench, the productivity of a database professional is increased as the tool eliminates the complex and error-prone processes of manually performing the previously mentioned tasks, resulting in an end result that is a quicker and more efficient delivery of MySQL-based applications.
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