IDERA ER/Studio Reviews

Data modeling and database design for PepsiCo.

We were using ERwin before we used ER/Studio. I've been doing data modeling for well over 20 years. Converting from one to the other at the time, ER/Studio was more sophisticated, gave us better functionality, and was more reliable. 

The ability to visually represent what the database tables are going to look like and their relationships. Also, the ability to document the definitions of the tables and the columns that are in a table so that we can communicate what the data is and how it should be used.

The Repository, as well. We have a database design group of about 15 people. The Repository enables multiple people to work on the same model at the same time. We have fully integrated models, so we have one model for the enterprise data warehouse, one model for MDM, with a lot of sub-models in these things. People work on different parts of the model at different times. So the Repository enables us to share the models, and keep track of what everybody is working on.

What I would like to see improved is the reliability of the releases, releases that are a little less buggy.

Also, I'd like the ability to debug the errors ourselves instead of having to call them. There are certain types of errors that, I wouldn't say they come up regularly, but when you have an error it is very often the same type of error. Knowing that it's a Type III or Type I, it would be nice to have some kind of debugging facility for us to use, to find out where the problem that threw that error occurs. That would be a really cool feature.

It is mostly stable. We do throw errors every once in a while. We don't have a tremendous problem with stability, but we would always like to see Repository performance improve, checking in and checking out.

We haven't had any issues with scalability because the product works on individual workstations. We have shared licenses but everybody works on their own workstation. It's only when it goes back into the Repository that everything comes together. So, working individually is never a problem. You just need enough memory on your machine.

Tech support has been good. I have no complaints about it.

We haven't needed to use tech support in quite a while. But when we do, we have to go through whatever their process is, and if we haven't been able to resolve it through the regular process, then we get an individual person that we talk with directly to work with us to solve the problem. They have gotten onto our machines with us. They've been very responsive. They have their standard routine of what they have to do, but if that doesn't solve something, then they will get on with us individually or they ask us to send them the model and they figure it out.

We were using ERwin back in the early 2000s. Whenever we got a release, it was buggy. I didn't love ERwin at the time and we were looking for another solution. We had ER/Studio and Embarcadero come and talk to us. We got really excited about the tool, ER/Studio. It was going in a direction that sounded like it would be better for us at the time. It had more features that impressed us at the time and it was easy to convert.

It was 15 years ago. I think they came in and helped us when we did the setup. The setup of the tool itself is easy. The issues that we had were related to our environment. The tool is easy to set up but it depends on what your enterprise's architecture is. It's really about the Repository. The standalone workstations are easy. But if you're dealing with the Repository and enterprise architecture that makes it a little bit more complex. Then you have issues and you need their support.

I am not involved in the pricing. We have one person who does that. so I have no knowledge of what it is.

We have some individual licenses and then we have a concurrent license. And it's been working fine.

Try to take advantage of as many of the features as you can. It has a wealth of time-savers and features that are extremely useful. We haven't been able to use all of them because we already had so much done. To try and use some of them by going back over thousands and thousands of tables and columns would have been impossible. If you are is just starting with it, if you can take advantage of the Data Lineage and some of the other interesting features that it has, it is definitely worthwhile.

My rating comes from a purely selfish perspective, in the way I use it. For what I do, I give it an eight out of 10. The reason is - and this is partly our fault because we haven't finished, we haven't upgraded to newest release yet - that there are some buggy things in it that we still have to get resolved. For us, upgrading is very difficult because we have so many people, and we have to coordinate with our database people. Our services are now outsourced, so to coordinate things and get everybody on and get an upgrade done is not easy. Obviously, we try to avoid it as long as we can.

The primary use would be all the data modeling of the enterprise. People can access the data model through the portal: all the modeling and all the data dictionary, column-level documentation, glossaries, etc. We use the portal for maintaining those.

The main tool that we use is IDERA Architect on the team portal.

Before this tool, just managing the changes and publishing the models to the users became very cumbersome. This tool has simplified our day-to-day tasks a lot.

• Easy to model.
• Has a user-friendly interface.
• I like the team portal because, once we upload, the entire team can see the model.

Whenever there is a new version, there are a lot of release notes on the technical side of it, but I would like to be told why are we doing the upgrade. For example, we are moving from 16 to 17. What I would like to really see is how this benefits us from the business point of view. What are the real benefits that the user gets? I want some kind of white paper. The release notes describe the technical enhancements but, from the layman's point of view, if someone asks me what are the business benefits of this upgrade, I don't have any documentation to explain it to the business.

I already mentioned this to my account manager. He said they will put me with one of the product development teams to have this kind of discussion.

There have been some issues with performance, and there are some issues with inconsistencies.

We are also working to upgrade our servers. With more and more model and more and more operators, the check-in and the checkout processes are somewhat slow. Right now it's difficult for us to tell if it is, in fact, a product issue. We are upgrading our servers. We will have to really test it. Right now, if there are more than two or three users using the product, we sometimes face the issue.

We bought premium support and so far it is good. The normal technical support is okay; I would not rate it too high. After we got the premium support things were much better. Regarding the last upgrade, they really helped us by walking us through it step by step. That was really good.

We always want to have peace of mind that we can reach them. When we had regular support, sometimes it was very difficult to get hold of them. We upgraded our support to premium, to make sure that we get the proper attention.

The initial setup was straightforward. While there is some documentation, we had a live session and the support and product management team really walked us through, so it was straightforward. There are some areas that we do by looking at the documentation.

The licensing could be a little bit more flexible. The issue we face is that it is kind of complex the way the keys are set up. I'm not sure if it's by design, but let's say you have to install a product on a test system. You have to get a trial license key, even though you have been a loyal customer for two years. It's just very difficult to again request an additional key and then go through all the setup. It could be much simpler. 

The way we update the licenses is also a complex. I have to register the keys every time. And when we do it online there can be errors so we have to go to the workaround to be able to work on the data. 

The process of licensing could be much simpler, from our experience.

We evaluated ERwin and some other products.

It's a good tool but we have not had much training, so we are really exploring it on our own. There are some features we are still working on with our stakeholders to implement. So my advice to other customers who are implementing this product is to really understand the full features of the product and try to implement all the features at the beginning. Get training in all areas of expertise before launching the product. I wish we could have done that from the beginning.

To develop an underlying platform upon which to base our data governance program by creating a central repository for maintaining and disseminating logical, physical models for our enterprise-wide databases.

We have been able to quickly create models for our enterprise-wide databases, even when some of them are third-party databases. We have been able to then modify those models, breaking them down to make them more understandable. Loading these models into the ER/Studio Team Server repository, it allows us to disseminate this information to the entire enterprise. 

Team Server allows us to further define those models through the use of glossaries and gives us the ability to collaborate as a data governance team to ensure that terms defined provide us a common understanding of our data. We are also able to document the data lineage and data flows of our data from one system to another.

• Modeling with Data Architect: We can quickly reverse-engineer a database from an existing database or create a model from scratch.
• Data lineage tracking: It allows us to identify upstream and downstream systems using data. This allows us to identify downstream impacts of making changes to data in a particular system, before the downstream systems break.
• Collaboration features in Team Server: With discussion threads, email notifications, and streams, we can collaborate with team members to make sure that models and glossaries are sufficiently defined to accurately and concisely reflect the meaning, purpose, etc. of our enterprise data.
• Change management: We can track changes to our data models and tie those changes back to specific tasks or efforts that we identify.

I would like to see better documentation/help for the Data Architect tool. 

Creation of tutorials would be nice. There are some features which are not as clearly defined as they should be.

This application does a lot of things, as do competitor products, but the main reason to go with this product was the ability to create many automations, where we can improve our work and our process.

Organization, security, centralization.

The product is pricey.

About four years.

Sometimes our version is a little unstable. But I think this problem occurs because our version is old. We are in the migration process to the current version.

No.

Very good. When we need, they respond to us quickly.

I didn’t use other solutions in my work, only in tests.

A support member in my company helped with the initial installation.

The product can have a high price.

Yes. erwin and ePower.

Talk with other people before purchasing to learn about their experience with the product.

The ability to define a set of domain definitions and group them in folders is a valuable feature. There is also a Macro (VB script) feature that allows you to automate many features that can save a lot of time.

Although the tool allows for many different options as far as the what can be displayed on the model, it would be nice if they allowed for entity objects (attributes, indexes, keys, etc.) as well as the textual definition of the object. The current design only allows one or the other. I like to have a little verbiage on each entity included in the model that describes it purpose, this is allowed in the tool but you can't show both the entity structure and the text at the same time without creating a separate text object and placing the text in it.

I've been personally using this product for 9 Years.

Deployment can be complicated with their licensing model. I typically have to call tech support to get the correct files and licensing all straightened out.

The repository which is used to store the models can slow down when multiple models are added. This has improved with later releases but it is still slow at times.

Customer service is very good but they're a west coast company and we're on the east coast and I have to wait until later in the morning before I can talk to a support person.

Technical support is typically very good.

I had prior experience with Sybase's Power Designer tool at a former employer. When I came to this company they had other Embarcadero tools and were interested in using a single vendor for SQL Server development.

Installation of the product itself is straight forward although the licensing process is awkward and confusing at best. If you have a workstation license that's not to bad, but we have a WS and 2 different concurrent licenses, which requires a license server set up and getting all the proper installations products requires (me anyway) to contact the support to get the correct files and the correct licensing information.

If you have a repository setup that increases the process even more.

I'm the administrator for our ER/Studio setup for our IT department, we have 5 or so actual users of the tool.

Fairly expensive tool and licensing setup is cumbersome.

Sybase Power Designer

It's a great tool for modeling and I'm generally very happy with its features.

Being able to to perform reverse engineering is valuable to us.

I used the tool for data modeling, so I cannot say much.

It did everything that I needed, and I didn't think about enhancements while using the product.

I've used it for six months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

9/10.

I did use different solutions that were available with the companies I worked for. I evaluated a couple of modeling tools, as I personally wanted to purchase a product.

Initial set-up is straightforward.

I think ER/Studio Data Architect is priced high, but it comes with user-friendly features.

I personally compared it with SAP PowerDesigner when I started using ER/Studio Data Architect, and I think they both are equally good tools.

There are only a handful of ERD features that I’ve needed over the years that ER/Studio DA didn’t support. It’s flexible, intuitive for the newbie and yet supports the complexity required of a seasoned database designer, and offers a clean sophisticated presentation.

The work of the database architect is complex. ER/Studio DA supports in a single application everything from taxonomy and data dictionary definitions to conceptual, logical, and physical data models, relational and dimensional models, reverse engineering from legacy database structures, merging and comparison between database versions, exporting of ERD images and data dictionaries and DDL from physical data models, and it does so at a reasonable price point for such a polished and feature-rich offering.

Things that come to mind that I’ve not been able to do in prior projects include:

• Support for SQL Server filtered indexes, both a means to effectively represent this in a data model and have it produce the filtered index in the rendered DDL
• Support for some of the open source RDBMS for reverse engineering and migration

I’ve used ER/Studio at various clients since 2008.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

While they weren’t always able to solve my issue (feature limitations not bugs/education issues), when I did reach out to Embarcadero they were always extremely responsive and professional.

I’ve also used ErWin, Powerdesigner, Toad Data Modeler, MS Visio, and Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. ER/Studio has the features and the price point that is easy to realize ROI quickly.

There were issues with the licensed server, but after that is was smooth sailing.

We did it in-house.

Within a week of installation I had reverse engineered several existing databases into physical data models with basic data dictionaries and published them on the company wiki. The perception of value was extremely high.

As long as the tool natively supports the RDBMS databases you use, and you have someone that can support the licensed server, it’s a great solution.

• Centralised Repository where all the models are stored
• TeamServer (Portal) which gives access to the models (read only) through a web browser
• Entity Llinking Ability across data models
• Reuse of objects within workspace on multiple diagrams

The organisation is a huge enterprise spread across various countries, and use ER Studio as a centralised documentation of systems/application architecture repository. This has helped the new application development team in cross-verifying, and understanding, the current setup, proposing and architecting new solutions for the organisation. Since the models are stored in a centralised repository, the process of review/refinement are handled by teams all over the world, who can now collaborate and build a common solution.

• Reusability of objects across multiple workspaces is a feature that would help in building a single enterprise model using linked up workspaces
• Copy/Paste of diagrams to create copies between workspaces would be a handy feature to have

I've used it for over two years.

There have been no issues encountered.

There have been no issues encountered.

We are fully satisfied.

We are fully satisfied.

We did use other tools, and we switched because this solution offered us the following -

1. Stability
2. A centralised repository
3. Provision for offline availbility using TeamServer
4. Entity linking accross modules

As a fresh implementation the setup was straightforward, and clear documentations helped when we were setting up the environment.

We take care off all maintenance/upgrades of the toolset in-house.

.Purchase licenses only for the functionalities which the organisation will use.

Make effective use of Entity Reusability for an enterprise level usage.

Reverse engineering existing databases. I use the reverse engineering features to map existing databases to understand their structure and make improvements.

One example is the use of the product to make extracts and split databases, and we were selling parts of the company to other regions of other companies. It made the process more efficient and faster and less costly.

I don't have any specific ideas about how to improve the product. I always have the upgrades and every upgrade comes with some improvements and it's good.

I've used both products for over 10 years probably between 10 and 14 years, I don't remember the exact number.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

10/10.

The previous standard was Your Studio by CA, and I used that until I discovered the alternatives and immediately worked with the standards committee to include it and the standards for the company. I chose this product because it's ease-of-use an excellent support.

Initial set up was pretty straightforward, and it looks for database connections that are already configured on your machine and automatically sets them up once it's installed great feature.

I implemented just my own copy I didn't do it large-scale implementation. Other people within the company use it but it's independent for each user to set their own environment up I didn't have any problems or don't have a particular recommendations for other companies it's pretty straightforward.

The initial base price is a little bit high, and my recommendation is that once you've licensed the base, to keep the maintenance renewed because that's a much more reasonable annual cost.

My advice would be to use the Technical Support they're very good if you've got questions they're always there to help.