Why Associations Are Useful?¶
There are several reasons why you should define associations between views when appropriate:
From a performance perspective, some queries are executed much faster. There are some optimizations that the query optimizer can only apply if the appropriate associations are defined.
Virtual DataPort publishes information about the associations marked as referential constraints. Some business intelligence tools take into account this information to execute more efficient queries.
From a usability perspective, using the HTML representation of the RESTful Web service, you can browse across views that have an association between them.
From a metadata perspective, they help define a better semantic model because you can define referential constraints (primary key-foreign key relation) between views.
At runtime, third-party modeling tools that connect to Virtual DataPort can extract information about the foreign key relations established between views.
From the perspective of the Information Self-Service Tool, the associations allow business users to discover views that are related. For example: - When querying a view, you can traverse its associations. - The associations of the views are displayed in the Associations dialog of the tool.