Video : ER/Studio Data Architect

Welcome, and thanks for taking the time to view this video on ER/Studio’s Agile Change Management Features.

As we know, one of Agile’s core principles is to embrace change; however, before you can embrace change, you need the ability to manage it. That’s why, with the release of ER/Studio XE7, we’ve begun to incorporate new Agile Change Management functionality. The new Task and Change Record features within the ER/Studio Repository will allow you to track changes at a very granular level, such as additions, deletions and modifications to tables and columns. Let’s take a look!

Let’s first take a look at Tasks and Change Records by going to the Repository Change Management Center. Here we can see all of the change records that’ve been created, created at the time of check-in/check-out (we’ll see that in a moment). In the Task tab we can see all of the Tasks created. If I expand a specific Task, I can see all of the Change Records associated with that Task. I can go ahead and create a New Task, and associate any of these Change Records that aren’t already part of a task to your Task. I can also edit a Task, for instance if I want to change a status from Open to Closed.

Now let’s go ahead and take a look at the Change Records functionality and how to create those. As I mentioned before, you can create a Change Record at the time of check-in or check-out. So let’s go ahead and check-out this logical orders model. We’ll create a new Change Record for Adding a Customer Entity. I like to create a very descriptive Change Record here, and it’s helpful, of course, for anyone viewing the Change Records. Now I’m also going to associate this with a specific task. We’ll associate this with the Create and Maintain Orders data models task. I’ll click OK. The model will be checked out, and at this point we’ll create our Customer Table.

(Inserts Table) > Customer, and let’s go ahead and create the Customer ID column. We’ll give it a relationship with the Orders Table, a non-identifying relationship from Customer to Orders. Now I’d like to point out that our current Change Record is still marked as In Progress, as can be seen from the Change Management Center if we look at the specific Task. This will be marked as completed on check-in, so let’s do that now. We’ll go ahead and check-in our model, click OK. Once completed, we can go back to our Change Management Center. We’ll take a look at the Change Record, as you can see, now’s it’s completed.

If we want to see the specific details that are associated with that Change Record, specifically what was changed within that record, we can double-click on it. We’ll see the details here: one of course, we can see the User, Machine, Diagram, and Task that are associated with this Change Record. If we begin to expand this, we’ll be able to see the specific changes. Look for the Yellow Delta symbol to the left of the tree. That tells you what’s changed. Of course, something within the logical model has changed. If we expand the entities, we can see that both the Customer and Orders entities have changed. Let’s see specifically what has changed with Customers. We can see that a Customer ID was added, and because Customer ID is a primary key, we have a key added for that. Now we also created a relationship between Customer and Orders, so if we expand the Orders Table, we can see the Customer ID is a foreign key within the Orders entity. No specific sub-models, besides the main model, were modified during this Change Record.

There you can see how you can finely and granularly track and manage changes with the new Task and Change Record functionality within ER/Studio. Thanks again for viewing this video. If you’re interested in some other ways that ER/Studio can help you manage change, take a look at the videos for Naming Standards, which help you create model versions, as well as the Branch and Merge video. Have a great day!