Ellie 8.6 introduces a major step forward in ellie.ai ‘s asset reusability: reusable physical entities. Now your governed entities flow seamlessly from conceptual to logical — and finally into the physical layer.

Why this matters

• One definition, everywhere – customer, invoice, or campaign tables stay consistent across all physical models.
  
  
• Faster design – drag a glossary entity straight onto the physical canvas.
  
  
• Zero-touch updates – change once, propagate everywhere. Especially useful for no longer need to copy-paste attributes
  
  
• Governance built-in – ownership, version history, and permissions travel with the folder that entities are.
  
  

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We Made a Big Change to Foreign Keys 

In conceptual and logical models, a foreign key is just an attribute flag.

In the physical layer this changes completely:

• FK attributes are converted into Draft FKs. Draft FKs instruct you about whether to take the attribute into FK constraint (relationship) or not.
  
  
• FKs defined in other levels can be used as a guide when creating the real FK constraints
  
  
• The new Foreign Key Constraint Editor guides you in finalizing constraints.
  
  

This is a fundamental shift that makes physical modeling database-ready and far more precise.

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Export the DDL has been move under its own menu item 

Now it’s easier to find, generates database-ready scripts, and reflects your finalized reusable entities and FK constraints.

What’s Next

• Reusable relationships are just around the corner — powered by our new relationship editor.
  
  
• After that, we’ll move on to re-using even larger modeling constructs for whole-design acceleration.
  
  

💡 With Ellie 8.6, reusable entities now span conceptual, logical, and physical levels. And with the new FK handling, physical modeling has never been stronger.