| Approaches Features | Data Model | Abstraction Level | Concepts | Concrete Languages | Modeling Tools | DB Tools Support |
| Operational | Entity- Relationship Model | Conceptual, Logical | Entity Relationship Attribute Primary Key Foreign Key | Chen’s, Crow’s foot, Bachman’s, Barker’s, IDEF1X | Sparx Enterprise Architect, Visual Paradigm, Oracle Designer, MySQL Workbench, ER/Studio |
|
| Relational Model | Logical, Physical | Table Row Attribute Primary Key Foreign Key, View, Index | SQL-DDL, UML Data Profile | Sparx Enterprise Architect, Visual Paradigm, Oracle Designer, MySQL Workbench, ER/Studio | Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2 | |
| Decision Support | OLAP Cube | Conceptual, Logical | Dimensions, Levels, Cube faces, Time dimension, Local dimension | Common Warehouse Metamodel | Essbase Studio Tool, Enterprise Architect, Visual Paradigm | Oracle Warehouse Builder, Essbase Studio Tool, Microsoft Analysis Services |
| Star Schema | Logical, Physical | Fact table, Attributes table, Dimensions, Foreign Key | SQL-DDL, DML, UML Data Model Profile, UML Profile for Modeling Data Warehouse Usage | Enterprise Architect, Visual Paradigm, Oracle SQL Data Modeler | Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2 | |
| Big Data | Key-Value | Logical, Physical | Key, Value | SQL-DDL, Dynamo Query Language |
| Dynamo, Voldemort |
| Document | Logical, Physical | Document, Primary Key | SQL-DDL, Javascript |
| MongoDB, CounchDB | |
| Wide-Column | Logical, Physical | Keyspace, Table, Column, Column Family, Super Column, Primary Key, Index | CQL, Groovy |
| Cassandra, HBase | |
| Graph | Logical, Physical | Node, Edge, Property | Cypher Query Language, SPARQL |
| Neo4j, AllegroGraph |