Data Modeling: Schema Generation Issue with ERwin Data Modeler 7.3

We are using Computer Associate's ERwin Data Modeler 7.3 for data modeling. In one of our engagements, we are pushing data model changes to the physical database (Oracle 11g R2) via ERwin's Forward Engineering / Schema Generation functionality.

The Forward Engineer / Schema Generation wizard offers the "Physical Order" option under "Column". Checking this box is supposed to force the ERwin DDL generation engine to preserve the column order (i.e. the column order in the physical database must match the column order in the logical/physical model).

Problem: Even though our data modelers pay very close attention to the column order in the logical and physical model in ERwin, the Forward Engineering / Schema Generation process seems to lose the physical column order when generating the DDL (even though the "Physical Order" option is checked). Thus, the column order in the Oracle database never matches with the column order in the ERwin data model.

Solution / Work-Around: This is a bug as the behavior of this option seems to be inverted. If you want to preserve the column order, the "Physical Order" must be un-checked.

Best Practices for Maintaining a Data Dictionary

Maintaining an up-to-date Data Dictionary is an important but often neglected task of data modelers. The most critical success factor for maintaining an up-to-date Data Dictionary is the ability to associate data elements to their corresponding business description within the data modeling tool itself. We will demonstrate how this can easily be accomplished with Computer Associate’s ERwin Data Modeler.

Step 1: Open your data model in CA ERwin Data Modeler and switch from the Logical view to Physical or Dimensional view. Enter the business description for each column into the corresponding “Comment” column property as shown below.

Step 2: If your target database server supports comments, ERwin can generate comments in the schema DDL script. In order to demonstrate this functionality, we will use ERwin’s Forward Engineer functionality to push our data model to an Oracle 11g database server. Make sure to check the “Comments” check-box under “Other Options” in the Forward Engineer Schema Generation wizard.

Step 3: The comments are now available in the database. The screenshot below shows that the comments are visible in Oracle’s SQL Developer. Thus, the data dictionary and all its business descriptions are now fully integrated into the meta data of the database objects.

Step 4: Use ERwin’s Report Builder to create a Data Dictionary document. Report Builder queries the ERwin data model to create high quality PDF, Word, XML, or HTML documents that can be used as client deliverables. The screenshots below show the basic steps and a sample RTF output file.


In summary, maintaining the business descriptions for data elements within the data modeling tool has the following advantages:

• The business descriptions will only have to be maintained in one place (i.e. in the data modeling tool).
• The data dictionary is fully integrated into the meta data for database objects (if supported by the RDBMS).
• An official data dictionary document or web page can easily be created by the data modeling tool.