Conceptual Model Conversion - Ellie Version 4.7 Release

Abstract

You've created a conceptual model describing your business data needs and want to progress toward implementation design by creating a logical model? That just became much easier with Ellie v4.7!

The new feature, Conceptual-Logical model conversion, enables you to create new logical models directly from existing conceptual models. This is accomplished with a simple "Convert" button on the conceptual modeling canvas.

When the "Convert" button is clicked, Ellie automatically creates a new logical model with matching entities, relationships, and attributes.

Each logical entity gets its name and attributes from the source conceptual entity, and relationships are created with identical cardinalities. All of these can be modified in the new logical model as needed! The system creates links between new logical entities and their conceptual sources so you always know what your logical entities are.

Using model conversion to speed up development

When you want to ensure development efforts move in the right direction, a solid data model is essential. Logical models serve as good design documentation for your data products, but they must be based on real-life business requirements. Best practice involves documenting business requirements with a conceptual model, then deriving logical models for different use cases.

With Ellie's model conversion feature, you get a first-draft logical model immediately, based on your conceptual model. You can then modify this logical model to fit your needs: rename entities into facts and dimensions if building a star schema, or design hubs and links if building a Data Vault, for example.

You can always create another logical model from the same conceptual model as many times as you like! This allows you to use the conceptual model as an overall guide of "what should be," and utilize different logical models for different technical needs. All models can be exported from Ellie and linked with various data engineering tools and data catalogs to drive your implementation.

Other changes in v4.7

The latest Ellie version includes minor changes elsewhere. For those integrating Ellie's Glossary with data catalog solutions, an "updated at" field has been added to entity metadata available via Glossary API endpoints. This helps you find latest changes when synchronizing content between Ellie and a data catalog.

Regarding integrations, another example integration solution is being released in the open-source GitHub repository. The latest addition is a JavaScript solution for importing logical models from PostgreSQL and Snowflake; a Python solution for the same was added earlier. These are available as the basis for your own integration solutions, or for use as-is!