Tutorials: Using an Enterprise Logical Model to Design New Assets

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Reusing established definitions and patterns is an essential practice for maintaining consistency, quality, and interoperability across data projects. ER/Studio supports this by allowing modelers to draw from domain models and the Enterprise Data Model when creating or modifying designs. Using these shared assets ensures that new data structures align with corporate standards, reflect agreed-upon business meaning, and remain consistent across applications and data warehouse layers. Reuse also improves efficiency by reducing rework and strengthens governance by keeping definitions documented and accessible to analysts and architects.

The process to reuse content from one model to another uses the Compare/Merge tool. This allows you to copy objects from one model to another and also create Universal Mappings between the copy and the original for traceability. Universal mappings can be navigated in both Data Architect and Team Server.

The process should be

1. Open your target model
2. Open the source model such as the Enterprise Logical Data Model to Identify entities to reuse
3. Open the Compare/Merge tool
4. Select the source Model and submodel to copy to
5. On page 5
   1. select the entities you wish to copy and set the action to “Merge Into Target”
   2. Hit the Save Matches to create Universal Mappings between the copies of the entities back to the original entities. Selecting Save All Matches ensures that all objects have Universal Mappings created during the copy. You can choose whether to create Universal Mappings for just the Entities or other objects also.

See Also

• Working with Universal Mappings
• Using the Compare and Merge Utility