BiZZdesign HoriZZon (Enterprise Studio) vs. ER/Studio Data Architect

I would not recommend using BizzDesign. For Enterprise Architecture, like business strategy, business process modelling, IT architectures there are better and in most cases less expensive tools.

ER/Studio is great for providing data model images for teammates to use when they are not data modelers.

Incentivized

• Archimate support is as defined in the Archimate standard.

• ER/Studio is great for dividing logical and physical design. A logical model can be used with different physical platforms.
• Studio can a useful macro capability that allows me to apply the naming standards across the model with ease and consistency.
• ER/Studio does a very good job at comparing the model with the actual database and generating DDL scripts for production deployments.
• ER/Studio has an excellent reporting and model publishing capabilities allowing me to produce models in the HTML format and publish them for the team as needed.

Incentivized

• Usability of the tool is quite bad.
• It is tedious to even create simple reports. Created reports are published as image, so basically not usable for end users.
• Support of other model languages than Archimate is less supported. In ERD you do not even have a layout functionality.
• Any state of the art integrations like cloud stencils are missing.
• Import/export with Excel is tedious and SQL import not fully implemented.

• Relationships are a bit on the weaker side. Many times I found orphaned relationships that I could not get rid of, or additional columns that were automatically created during the push to the physical model that appear to be due to key constraint bugs
• There are a lot of bugs introduced when merging keys. I tend to model 2 tables for example logically, establish the relationship, and then merge the additional key column that is automatically created when establishing the relationship. This sometimes causes downstream issues with the physical model (creating duplicate columns with _1 appended)
• Meta-data could be improved. I find it hard to keep descriptions and other meta information clean when copying and pasting from other sources due to formatting tags being introduced on each object (font, size, color, etc.). The attachment feature comes in handy, however I am looking for the ability to cleanly document and map multiple sources to a single target while providing searchability and traceability

Incentivized

Support for simple questions is okay. For some more elaborate things, also tool errors, you may not get even an answer for months/more than a year.

I can call or email support and both get quick turn around. The only issue is they are on the west coast (US) and have a west coast work schedule and I'm on the East coast.

Incentivized

ER Studio Data Architect is a global leader in the data modelling space and most other solutions that have support for third party data models include support for ER Studio Data Architect file formats. Many of the features are a bit more intuitive than the competitors and several of our vendors were already using Data Architect themselves which helped solidify the choice.

Incentivized

• We were not able to get much benefit from the tool. Some users and partner teams meanwhile moved on to other software.

• Using ER\Studio to create models and eventually the actual database schema allows for a picture that is understandable to the customer and saves significant time writing DDL to create the database objects (tables, indexes, relationships, constraints...)
• A nice customer interface tool so you can create a web based interface to the metadata for a particular design.
• The tool also supports sub-models so you can break a large project into smaller parts, I find this feature very helpful.

Incentivized