ER/Studio Data Architect vs. SAP PowerDesigner

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

Incentivized

SAP PowerDesigner allows our team of data modelers to work and collaborate from a single repository and single data dictionary. This helps enforce consistency as data elements are referenced in other objects. Prior to our use of PD, we might have an element named "ppt" in one table, "participant" in another table and "part" in a third table. By forcing everything to be used from the data dictionary, we avoid these situations because everyone has to go to the dictionary. And we are able to easily do peer reviews on models before they are released because we are collaborating through the use of the repository.

Incentivized

• 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

• Impact Analysis
• The domain structure helps you to handle different data types to unify.
• Moving between from conceptual model to logical model and from logical model to physical model is so easy.
• It also excels at implementation of database vendor-specific physical options.
• The repository structure helps you to use in multi developer and architect based organizations by the check in and check out mechanism.
• It also has a fully configurable naming convention implementation.
• Coloring is simple with format copying and pasting option.

Incentivized

• 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

• It took some time to figure out how to leverage the power of the repository. Some better examples in the documentation would have been helpful.

Incentivized

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

We did have to reach out to support to learn how to properly utilize the repository feature and share the data model across many developers. Support was able to help us get this set up correctly. The downside was it took us several weeks before we gave up and contacted support. We should have done that earlier. I would say, however, the documentation wasn't clear on how to do this. So support was a great big help!

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

The version of ErWin we had didn't support the repository for document sharing and data dictionary sharing. Our version of PD does so we were able to leverage that and have a central repository that is shared among the team members. That really helped to give us consistency across our databases. PD is easy to use, but getting the repository set up properly was a little tricky.

Incentivized

• 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

• Standardization of models
• Impact Analysis
• Graphical User Interface
• Ease of deployment

Incentivized