Notation settings of the powerdesigner Conceptual Model

The database design model can be divided into two types: conceptual model design and physical model design. The conceptual model mainly reflects the business relationship in the real world, that is, our commonly used entity relationship diagram. After the conceptual model is designed, the physical model is directly converted and generated through the conceptual model, and then the physical model generated by the system is modified. The modeling of a conceptual model mainly relies on the business understanding ability of the modeling personnel, while the modeling of a physical model mainly relies on the modeling personnel's familiarity with a database product and related technical level.

Create a new conceptual data model in powerdesigner and select model notation. Five notation options are available in pd15. After creating a conceptual model, right-click the design panel and choose, select "Model Options" in the pop-up menu to bring up the model option window, and modify the model notation, as shown in:

Generally, we use the erdiagram as the conceptual model diagram. Therefore, we recommend that you select entity/relationship or E/R + merise, the difference between the two is that the latter also provides merise modeling theory based on the ER model, allowing the use of association and association link in the conceptual model. In the other three notations, merise uses Association to completely replace relationship; idef1x is the extended version of IDEF1 In the IDEF series method, and is based on the principle of E-R (Entity Relation) method, some rules are added to make the semantics richer. The expression is slightly different from the general erimage representation. Barker is simpler than the ER model, only the "entity" and "Link" components can be used for modeling, and the "inheritance" component cannot be used. Generally, the E/R model is enough. However, to better express the business relationship between entities, it is necessary to use Association to replace entities in some cases, therefore, we recommend that you select the E/R + merise model.