Archiving Data From External Databases

When developing an age-based lifecycle policy, you can assign data from an external database modeled in another PDM to the first phase. At the end of the first phase the data will be loaded from the external database to your warehouse.

In order to model external database data archiving, you must:

Create a PDM to model the external database.
Create a PDM to model the data warehouse.
Link the second PDM to the first through a data source.
Specify access parameters for the warehouse database and the external database on the Database Connection and Data Movement (Lifecycle) tabs of the data source.
Create mappings between the external tables that contain the data to be archived and the warehouse tables to which this data will be loaded.
Create a lifecycle in the warehouse PDM and create the first phase.
Set the Source of the first phase to External Database and specify the data source through which you have connected the external database PDM.
Select the tables to attach to the lifecycle.

PowerDesigner provides various tools to help you create parts of this archiving environment:

PDM-PDM model generation - can create the data warehouse PDM, the data source and mappings (see Linking an External Database by Generation)
The Mapping Editor - can help you create (or modify) the mappings between the external database and warehouse PDM tables (see Linking an External Database through the Mapping Editor)
The Data Source Wizard - can create the data source and table mapping, set the lifecycle source for the first phase and attach tables to the lifecycle (see Linking an External Database via the Data Source Wizard)

Linking an External Database by Generation
You can use the model generation mechanism to generate tables from your external database to your warehouse PDM and create the required data source and mappings in your warehouse PDM.
Linking an External Database through the Mapping Editor
You can use the Mapping Editor to manually create (or modify) mappings between the external database and warehouse tables that will be used to archive the data governed by the lifecycle. This method can be useful when you have PDMs to represent your external and warehouse databases and will be using non-standard mappings to load your data.
Linking an External Database via the Data Source Wizard
The Data Source Wizard guides you through creating an external database data source in your model, and to attach it and the tables to be managed to the first phase of your lifecycle

Parent topic: Lifecycles (PDM)