Summary

The database designers for EAB Healthcare have had a long, hard job, but they are getting close to completion. They have worked with various development teams , including business and systems analysts, developers, database administrators, end users, and more, to create a well- tuned database design to help run the MDS activities for EAB. They learned some new techniques in capturing and visualizing requirements and for the first time worked together with their development counterparts to design the entire system. As the design and de ployment of the system nears the end, the database designers have seen the success of working as a team and modeling all of the relevant artifacts in the database design and not just modeling the tables and columns .

The database design includes how the data will be stored and the properties important to storing the data. The storage modeling uses the UML components and gives the ability to show visually how tables relate to tablespaces, including visualization of partitions, how the tablespaces are associated to the schemas, and the database itself. This has been a great help to the database designers at EAB, giving them immediate feedback on the design of the storage for the MDS database and an easy way to understand what is required and how it can be implemented. Having the ability to model the storage has given the database designers a great form of communication with the database administrators and actually opened the doors to an iterative working relationship. The DBAs were able to give the designers instant feedback on what was needed for the specific database server chosen and how the database designers needed to reorganize the storage as required. If the teams had needed to sift through pages of reports on all of this information, rather than just quickly getting a picture, this process might have taken several more days or even weeks. The entire storage is summed up in just a few diagrams that show how the tables relate to the tablespaces, how the tablespaces relate to the schemas, how the schemas relate to the database, and on what hardware the database will reside.