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UML and Database Design Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a language for specification, visualization, construction and documentation of business models and other programming systems. UML is a combination of a great number of engineering approaches that used to be utilized for modeling of large and difficult systems. In the 70 - 80 s there existed a variety of object-oriented languages that were highly tailored and were used for one-purpose tasks. The majority of users was at a loss and could not choose a language that would meet all their needs.
This situation became an impetus for unification of various methods into more whole and universal modeling languages. In 1994 Grady Books and Jim Rumbaugh from Rational Software Corporation started working on the unification of Books method and OMT (Object Modeling Technique). In 1995 Ivar Jacobson and his company Objectors united with Rational. As a result the unified method was merged with OOSE (Object-Oriented Software Engineering) and in 1996 the UML was created.
The UML ideally blends with the modern world conditions, it was created for distributed, parallel and linked environment. The UML is not bound to any platform or programming language and is perfectly suitable for connecting networks of various systems. Its main characteristic is flexibility that allows it to adapt to new possible issues. According to Naiburg and Maksimchuk, the Unified Modeling Language is also an effective modeling tool for database design. When used as a common modeling language for the many facets of system development, the UML can serve as a unifying framework that facilitates the integration of database models with the rest of a system design. Nearly all applications of the e-business use databases.
One of the most difficult problems was coordination of programming languages and databases, because their different ways of declaration of data structure lead to imperceptible discrepancies and difficulties when transferring data between applications and databases. The use of the unified model UML, that is the basis for both a program code and database schemes, allows avoiding many of these problems. The Rational company has developed for UML a profile of database modeling that is supported in various versions of the application Rational Rose. This profile gives a possibility to construct a logical model of the information and a model of tables of the physical database, which is created on the basis of this data. Availability of two models allows the developer to tune and optimize the database structure that is very important while designing databases. As both models are connected, changes in one of them will be reflected in the other, which will let avoid discrepancies.
As Naiburg and Maksimchuk stated in their book UML for Database Design, the Unified Modeling Language has great benefits for database designers. First, it brings teams together, exposes elements directly on the model that normally get hidden behind modeled elements as tagged values, and describes the database design in great detail. Second, by leveraging work already done in both the requirements and the logical design phases, the database design team is able to get a quick start on building tables and columns and on understanding the requirements and business reasons for creating the database elements. Third, the constraints needed and ways the database would be used become quite evident because of the work done up front to uncover the needs of people using the database and to find out how the database would be used. Using the UML is quite valuable to all teams so far, since the database design is based on the logical design. The application developers can work on the application design at the same time based on the same artifacts.
When the time comes, it will be more intuitive for the teams to build the object relational mappings and to create the queries of the database. These benefits improve the quality of database design and make the work of database designers much easier. References: 1. Bell, D. (2003) UML basics: An introduction to the Unified Modeling Language. IBM. Retrieved Apr. 30, 2004, from web 2.
Naiburg, E. J. and Maksimchuk, R. A. (2001) UML for Database Design. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. , Chapter 7.
Retrieved Apr. 30, 2004, from web UML basics: An introduction to the Unified Modeling Language 3. Object Management Group, Inc. (2004) Introduction to OMG " s Unified Modeling Language (UML) Retrieved Apr. 30, 2004, from web
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