You have probably already learned that when you change the Logical Model you need to press the double-arrow pointing to right (Engineer to Relational Model) to get those changes to the Relational Model. But with Physical Model it is a different case: you create a Physical Model once and after that the tool will automatically add new object there. You only need to go and define the physical properties for those elements.

If you want, you can define defaults for physical properties. These defaults depend on the RDBMS selected: for example for Oracle they are different than for SQL Server. For Oracle RDBMS you can for example define the default user and the default tablespace.

 

For some of the elements you can also define templates: a set of properties that will be automatically set for a new element of that type. For Oracle RDBMS you can for instance define a template for tables and indexes. Here’s an example of an index template for an Oracle RDBMS:

 

The defaults you define in Preferences will be used to automatically set properties for a new elements of that type. But of course you can manually change them to something different for an individual element.

This functionality is very useful if the element of one type (tables, indexes, …) have some properties always or most of the time the same.

Note: You can also use Propagate Properties to easily copy properties from one element to several elements of the same type.

Note: if you cannot see the Physical Model in the Browser, right-click and select Open.