Modeling

Producing data-driven insights requires that technical teams and business teams have a common understanding of the organization's data assets and how those assets will be used to support business decisions. Technical teams understand the design of databases while business teams understand the business objects (such as customer, store, or vendor) that are of interest. Metadata Insights helps bridge this gap by providing physical modeling and logical modeling tools that are visually rich and independent of each other, enabling you to create both a technical view of data assets and a business view of objects of interest, and to link the two through mapping.

A physical model organizes your organization's data assets in a meaningful way. A physical model makes it possible to pull data from individual tables, columns, and views to create a single resource that you can then use to supply data to logical models or to perform profiling.

A logical model defines the objects that your business is interested in and the attributes of those objects, as well as how objects are related to each other. For example, a logical model for a customer might contain attributes for name and date of birth. It might also have a relationship to a home address object, which contains attributes for address lines, city, and postal code. Once you have defined the attributes of the objects your business is interested in, you can map physical data sources to the logical model's attributes, thereby identifying the specific data asset that will be used to populate that attribute.

Once the models are created, you can create a model store which is a virtual aggregation of the data referenced by physical and logical models. Model stores enable data federation from sources such as databases, file servers, and cloud services. When you create a model store, the data from the columns and tables that are used by the model is pulled and aggregated to the Spectrum™ Technology Platform. However, to access the model store, you first need to establish a connection to it. In Spectrum™ Technology Platform you can do it using the Add Data Sources page, which can be accessed through the Data Sources tab in Metadata Insights or through Management Console module. For more information, see Connecting to a Model Store in the Administration Guide.