Summary

This chapter reviewed the reasons to build a database design, specifically in the UML, and explored in detail the Profile for Database Design created by Rational Software Corporation, although this information is mainly an introduction. The next chapter goes into more detail on the Profile and how to use the UML for deployment and storage of the database elements. The UML has great benefits for database designers: it brings teams together, exposes elements directly on the model that normally get hidden behind modeled elements as tagged values, and describes the database design in great detail. By leveraging work already done in both the requirements and the logical design phases, the database de sign team at EAB was able to get a quick start on building tables and columns and on understanding the requirements and business reasons for creating the database elements. The constraints needed and ways the database would be used were quite evident because of the work done up front to uncover the needs of people using the database and how it would be used. Using the UML has been quite valuable to all teams so far and now that the database design is based on the logical design. The application developers are working on the application design at the same time based on the same artifacts. When the time comes, it will be more intuitive for the teams to build the object relational mappings and to create the queries of the database.