October 28, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I have looked at ER/Studio and other data modelers. While the tools seem competent the UIs are from another planet. For example, under Er/Studio after creating an Entity ("table)", trying to rename a field is not obvious. The context menu has no hint of how to do it. Highlighting the field and pressing F2 (Windows standard for renaming items) does not do the trick either. One can do it by double-clicking the entity and changing the name in the resultant dialog box. One can also hold down the shift key and click the field name. (Obvious??? !) Our develepers and DBAs use such tools but infrequently. We are looking for a quality modeler whose UI follows general Windows practices and expectations. Can you suggest any ones that do?
TIA,
barkingdog
October 29, 2009 at 2:07 am
Well, Visio allows data modelling, and should follow the Windows standards as it's a Microsoft product... but in my opinion it's the worst of those I've used. For a large number of entities, it gets painfully slow, and you can only forward engineer with the Enterprise Edition.
I haven't used the later versions of ERWin, but the earlier versions had a "rename" button. It's a lot better than Visio, but in my opinion ER/Studio is the best of the bunch.
October 29, 2009 at 5:15 am
ERStudio is probably one of the highest quality modeling tools you're going to run into. Almost anything else is a step down. It might not function like Word or Excel, but it does it's job extremely well. ERWin is pretty good. There's also PowerDesigner, which I evaled in the past. It was decent, but not as good as ERStudio for our needs. None of these work in the way you're asking for.
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October 30, 2009 at 6:29 am
I have used PowerDesigner by Sybase for a couple of years now
for DW modeling and find it to be wonderful. It is also a lot
less expensive than Erwin and also the Embarcadero tool.
I personally despise Visio...as it seems to really be a drawing
tool with a bit of DB modeling tossed in.
Just my 2 cents 🙂
BTW a single seat of PwerDesigner ran us about 3K for the
Data Architect Enterprise version which allows me to do
everything I could ever possibly want, including a data
dictionary (via their built in reporting tool) that I can publish
to Sharepoint easily.
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