Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Modeler

Alation is pretty easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves with Alation's help, no 3rd party needed. We are currently migrating to Snowflake, and it has been helpful with prioritizing what gets migrated. It's great for searching for tables and views. I even use it when I'm trying to find fields in a large table. If I'm not sure if the field is called first_name, firstname, or fname, I can use Alation's table page, filter for fields with "name", and easily find it.

Incentivized

If you have a database environment that gets frequent schema object change requests. erwin Data Modeler is a great tool for version control and release control. Also, it's very useful to communicate between database and application teams.

Incentivized

• Ability to link objects using the @ symbol. It allows us to easily provide a way to get more information or context. So if the business concept is part of a hierarchy, we can link to the other terms in that hierarchy.
• The customization is really helpful. Most object types have robust customization options. Others are less so, but it is improving. We've created multiple custom fields to support our data governance framework.
• The search feature with filtering is helpful in narrowing down what you're looking for.

Incentivized

• Creation of logical data models
• Reverse engineering
• Excellent communication tool in conversations with Developers and BAs
• As a company, Erwin provides lots of tutorials and how-tos.

Incentivized

• The lineage UI is not ready for primetime. I would not recommend this feature for my users at this time because it's too complex to understand and is visually difficult to track down specific paths.
• The underlying infrastructure of the on-premise version of the software is fragile and unnecessarily complicated, using too many modules and technologies.
• The license model of the on-premise version contains too many add-ons. I would like to pay one price and get all of the features.

Incentivized

• erwin Data Modeler allows only 25 entities in a trial version. It really limits you when you want to try out the product before actually deciding to pay for licensing cost. It would be rather helpful if they limit the trial period by days instead.
• The UI is pretty good but sometimes the large diagrams are hard to manage. A little improvement in that area would be helpful.

Incentivized

Mostly because the search feature is case sensitive. This causes issues when users are searching for an industry standard acronym. These acronyms exist as attributes in thousands of places across our data ecosystem. Alation allows stewards to endorse attributes so that these endorsed items rise to the top of search results. The problem is no one types acronyms in caps in a search field. Alation returns results matching the case (lower-case) and in several instances the endorsed attributes don't even appear on the first page of results

The product is well designed and intuitive to use. The number of buttons and options can look a bit overwhelming initially but they come very handy when you get used to product.

Incentivized

From the RightStart Program to the Customer Success team to technical support, Alation has it all covered. They respond quickly and expertly to answer my questions and fix my problems.

Incentivized

CA customer support and our account manager have been able to support us with any issues that we have had, from managing our serial keys to issues we logged tickets to resolve. There are aspects of key management that have made it difficult over the years but support usually has worked with us.

Incentivized

Alation might not have the same level of technical capabilities and features as these others (though it's very close) but what Alation offers is a neat and easy to learn UI. The new UI is even better, bringing more content onto the same space like Informatica while maintaining the friendly interface of the old UI

I have used few other data modeling tools like Toad Data Modeler and SQL Developer Data Modeler. erwin Data Modeler is easy to use and has additional features that make overall data modeling productive and easy to manage.

Incentivized

• We've had limited but very positive impact for 3 data subject matter experts. In the past they were fielding very similar questions from users stumbling on their data. Now, rather than responding to each email or chat message, they not only direct users to the catalog but they also reach out to me to do a walk-through of Alation's other features.
• Another positive impact is having the data dictionary live in one location. This has been tremendous in making the dictionaries accessible and consistent.

• Reduced rework from when models were maintained individually.
• Reduced the amount of time to generate and compare models during development.
• Massively reduced the amount of time to reverse engineer 3rd party data models for analysis.

Incentivized