Create an Entity Relationship Model in SAP Datasphere

An E/R model provides a diagram for organising your data entities (tables and views) in relation to one another. You can:

• Add entities from the repository or import them from a connection or a CSN file, as well as creating new entities directly.

• Modify the properties of your entities including adding human-readable business names and creating associations directly in the diagram.

• Save and deploy all the contents of your model with a single action.

The work that you do in an E/R model benefits all the users in your Space as they can use the entities that you import or enhance as sources in their views.

A data model is a way to organise the data and define the relationship between the data elements you have, to give it a structure. This structure must be aligned with your team’s needs to generate reports and queries.

1. Go to the Data Builder and click on the New Entity-Relationship Model button.

   

2. This takes you into the graphical modelling interface. Since you imported the sample data manually via CSV, then your data can be found under the Repository.

3. Click and drag the table SalesOrders onto the canvas. This table holds information about customer orders.
4. Next, click and drag the table SalesOrderItems to add more detailed information about your orders.
   

5. With the data tables now in your modelling interface, you are now ready to create the relevant associations and deploy your E/R model.

After including the SalesOrder table and the SalesOrderItems tables from your Best Run Bikes dataset into the model, they must now be associated to each other.

1. Click on the SalesOrders table and then click on the Create Association arrow icon.

2. Drag it over to the SalesOrderItems table to create an association between the two tables.

   

3. Ensure that the created association is between the columns SalesOrderID in the Association Properties panel.

4. Drag and drop to connect the sales column from one table to the other if it’s not done already.

   

5. Next, click and drag the BusinessPartners table. This table contains information on Best-Run Bikes customers, which is useful when connected to the sales data. We’ll go ahead and create an association to the SalesOrders table using the PartnerID column.

   

6. Now add some geographical location information to the model. Drag the Addresses table onto the canvas.

7. And now create an association between the Addresses and BusinessPartners tables using the AddressID column.

   

You’ve now joined all the tables we will be using in this model. Type a name into the Model Properties panel and click on Save. And once that’s completed, you can click on the deploy icon.

You have now created associations between the tables by creating an Entity-Relationship model. You can now use this model to create Graphical or SQL views and model your data accordingly.