Working with Design Layers › Design Layers

Design Layers

A design layer is a single data model or set of data models used for a particular purpose in the application development processes. Each design layer is part of a hierarchy of two or more design layers.

In the simplest view of design layer hierarchy, the first design layer is a logical data model that captures the business requirements for an application. Then in a second design layer, those business requirements are transformed into database implementation rules in a physical data model. A generic physical model may be created using generic ODBC as the target database. A third design layer may represent different physical implementations of the same data model, but on different target server platforms.