April 6, 2005 at 7:44 am
My company is currently considering a new data modeling tool. We currently use Erwin 3.5. Anyone have any suggestions? I need some ammo in terms of supported features, OS requirements, demo download if available and of course price.
There are only a few requirements I need met:
must be able to import ERWIN models
must be able to reverse engineer .Net projects
must support windows auth on SQL 2000
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
April 7, 2005 at 6:09 am
I don't have any suggestions, but I'd really like to know why you're switching away from ERWin. We're about to embark on a big project, and I'm going to be using ERWin for the data modeling, even though I don't have a ton of experience with it (or any other modeling tool). What's your opinion of it? Where does it fall short for you?
TIA!
-mt
April 7, 2005 at 8:09 am
Not sure about your need to reverse engineer .NET projects, but for data modeling, we switched to Embarcadero ER Studio from ERwin and are very happy with the change.
April 7, 2005 at 10:22 am
I have used both ERwin and ER Studio and while they are very similar in terms of capability, I personally found that the Embarcadero products a bit easier to use and a bit more intuitive. Add to that the fact that Embarcadero is cheaper than Erwin suite and I was sold on it.
April 7, 2005 at 10:32 am
Thank you all for your information thus far.
Michael T. :
We are switching away from Er Win for several reasons. First, it's only a data architect tool. Though they market it as an "integrated suite" and ER WIN is the "hub", they've never been able to get the purchased technoilogy to work well together. Second, there is no support for Conceptual modeling, only PDM and LDM. Tools like PowerDesigner seem much better as total solutions.
We've taken a look at ER Studio and found similar issues. This is a company that purchased their technology and alot of finger pointing results when things don't go right. Also, the pricing is a bit outrageous considering that part of the fee goes to Microsoft for their bogus VBA script language contained in it. Our biggest complaint about ER Studio is that it was built upon a java engine and running on a windows pc, this causes lockups and generally alot of cpu and I/o utilization. To be really productive with it, several instances have to be open and that crushes your pc performance.
ERWIN and ER Studio also don't support reverse engineering ,Net projects which for us, presents a major limitation.
April 7, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Um, just one clairfication - ER Studio has zero Java (no java engine, etc.) in it, all developed in house (being close, we visited their Monterey lab) and we've used the scripting language quite a lot to extend the tool. Anyway to each his own...!
April 7, 2005 at 2:16 pm
April 7, 2005 at 6:24 pm
Yeah, no java that I am aware of and if you are experiencing lockups because of something the JVM is doing then I would strongly suggest looking very closely at what the programmer of that product/application is doing because there is most likely a serious flaw or error in the code.
Also, the most recent versions of both tools have components that will perform reverse engineering. I just recently did a comparison of all the tools out there and this was a major requirement for my job.
April 7, 2005 at 8:21 pm
We use ER Studio, and I have used ERWin in the past. First, ER Studio is not Java based. Second, as you stated, neither one is capable of being an application architect tool, they are database modeling tools. Similarly, the object modeling tools I have seen are completely inadequate for database modeling. In my opinion, the two are not the same and should not be confused, different perspective, different skill sets, different tools...
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If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this. -Friedrich August von Hayek
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April 8, 2005 at 6:46 am
April 8, 2005 at 7:54 am
Yep - no java in ER Studio as others have stated. And it is for data modeling only. Now, Embarcadero does have a UML modeling tool called Describe, which is java based, but I've got no first hand experience with it so I can't say much more other than there is a bridge between it and ER Studio.
April 8, 2005 at 7:57 am
April 8, 2005 at 7:10 pm
Yeah that is what I saw... I compared around 15 tools out on the market today (sorry don't have the list with me) and rated them each on a 10 point scale in terms of features, database platforms supported, price, and so on... Among them were tools such as Erwin, ER Studio, and System Architect and Erwin and ER Studio came out as the top 2. I have to admit the tie-breaker between the two for me came down to price and the subjective "feeling" of the tools. Embarcadero just seemed more intuitive to me and things seemed to work a bit easier. Also, the ability to change target platforms was a breeze compared to doing the same in other tools.
April 12, 2005 at 9:24 am
April 12, 2005 at 8:24 pm
I did, it came in just shy of the CA and Embarcadero products. One of the things it was lacking was a tie in with other tools for modeling code and such which Embarcadero has. I think it was only 2 or 3 points behind the top two though.
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