Anchor Modeling

Out of three nominated papers, our paper on anchor modeling was selected as the best paper of ER’09 in Gramado, Brazil.

Anchor Modeling – An Agile Modeling Technique using the Sixth Normal Form for Structurally and Temporally Evolving Data
By: Olle Regardt, Lars Rönnbäck, Maria Bergholtz, Paul Johannesson, Petia Wohed (Affecto and DSV, SU/KTH, Sweden)

The presentation held at ER’09 is available as a PDF document.

Anchor Modeling ER09 Presentation

In the photo below Lars Rönnbäck can be seen accepting the award.

We are glad to announce that our paper on Anchor Modeling has been accepted to ER’09. Less than one of five submissions were accepted, putting ER amongst the most selective conferences. Read more about the conference on their homepage by clicking here. The paper can be found on the university blog by clicking here.

We have shown that table elimination is used in the Oracle query optimizer, at least since version 10gR2. It is also present in the Express Edition (XE). Both historized and non-historized attributes are eliminated from queries using the latest view, as shown in the proof of concept script found here.

In order to get table elimination to work in Oracle we had to rewrite the SQL-code for the latest view to suit PL/SQL. It should however be semantically equivalent to the Transact-SQL version used in SQL Server. Using AUTOTRACE to run some queries shows that the table elimination is in effect.

We have written a brief paper on how the sixth normal form relates to Anchor Modeling.

Analysis of Normal Forms

We have submitted a paper on Anchor Modeling together with the University of Stockholm and the Royal Institute of Technology to the 28th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling held in Gramado, Brazil on 9-12  november 2009. More information about the conference can be found by clicking here.

The submitted paper can be found here.

We have released a toolkit for automating the generation of tables and collapsing views. The toolkit contains an XML Schema specification for anchor models, together with an XML file of an example model, and an XSLT translating the XML into an SQL Server 2005 script. The script sets up all tables with indexes as well as the latest and point-in-time collapsing views. We will continue our work on this “tool” in order to simplify its use.

AnchorModeling Toolkit v0.3.4

Please note that this toolkit has been deprecated in favor of the online modeling tool.

We held a guest lecture at KTH/SU for the Data Warehousing and Relational Database Modeling classes. The Anchor Modeling technique was presented and contrasted against other types of modeling.

SU KTH Course Presentation

We have made a “cheat sheet” which lists the most important features of Anchor Modeling.

Anchor Modeling Cheat Sheet

Together with DSV at the university of Stockholm the authors Lars Rönnbäck and Olle Regardt will write an article on Anchor Modeling. It will be published some time durnig the autumn of 2008.

We have presented Anchor Modeling at the TDWI conference in Amsterdam 2007. Check out this link for more information.

Anchor Modeling TDWI Presentation