PowerDesigner

PowerDesigner is business process / data modeling software and a metadata management solution for data architecture, information architecture, and enterprise architecture.

IBM Automatic Data Lineage can scan PowerDesigner and automatically pull physical, logical, and conceptual models that can then be incorporated into end-to-end logical data lineage.

Automatic Data Lineage currently scans:

• Physical models

• Logical models

• Conceptual models

PowerDesigner Scanner Overview

The PowerDesigner scanner parses provided input XML specifications of PowerDesigner models. The models can be of physical, logical, or conceptual layers. The physical layer can share a database connection configuration, and the logical or conceptual layers provide a higher level of abstraction for the data visualization. The data lineage is interpolated from the physical to the higher-level layers by utilizing the mappings between physical and logical or conceptual objects within the models. If the PowerDesigner scanner and relevant database scanners are correctly configured, Automatic Data Lineage can enrich physical assets scanned from a database with metadata available in the PowerDesigner model.

Supported Features

• Models for physical, logical, and conceptual layers

• Mapping between layers

• Asset metadata such as definition, annotation, comment, and keywords

• Check constraints, created from server expressions of business rules, on the column level and table level for physical, logical, and conceptual layers

• Table-level primary key constraints for physical, logical, and conceptual layers

• Column-level foreign key constraints for physical and logical layers

• Column-level metadata such as data type, data type length, and nullability

• Name and comment on all constraints

Known Unsupported Features

Automatic Data Lineage does not support the following PowerDesigner features. This list includes all of the features that IBM is aware are unsupported, but it might not be comprehensive.

• Visualization of ER relationships or referential integrity constraints

• Inheritance relationships for the conceptual layer

• Other types of object metadata such as domain

• Other types of business rules such as requirement, validation, or formula

• Other types of table keys (e.g., alternate key)

• Column-level metadata such as precision

• Database constraints such as indexes or uniqueness

• Extraction of lineage from the model itself

• Analysis of SQL code within the model

Check out the guides below for more details on setting up this scanner.

• PowerDesigner Integration Requirements
• PowerDesigner Manual Inputs
• PowerDesigner Resource Configuration

Extraction and Analysis Phase Scenarios

Extraction Phase

For the extraction phase for PowerDesigner, there is only one scenario.

1. PowerDesigner ingestion scenario - pulls inputs from git Manta Flow Agent Configuration for Extraction:Git Source or a remote agent filesystem location Manta Flow Agent Configuration for Extraction:Agent Source

Analysis Phase

For the analysis phase for PowerDesigner models, there is only one scenario.

1. PowerDesigner dataflow scenario — analyzes metadata from the provided PowerDesigner models and and saves it in your Automatic Data Lineage metadata repository