DBArtisan vs. ER/Studio Data Architect

DBArtisan is excellent for large institutions with multiple mission-critical databases. It works especially well for cross-platforms RDBMS support. I am mostly familiar with Oracle, but less familiar with SQL Server and Sybase. So I certainly appreciate having a similar interface that allows me to manage those less familiar RDBMS, as this will mean a smaller learning curve. DBArtisan is mostly for DBAs, it is not suitable for developers, I believe the vendor has a separate tool for that

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The free trial offer was great for me to test the software before purchasing it.
• It monitors queries well and shows resource allocation, as well as detailed stats for each running query.

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

• DBArtisan lacks a utility that does schema or object comparisons, which is a feature in Toad. I find this useful in some situations where I need to find out all differences between Prod and QA for a given schema, for example. DBArtisan doesn't seem to have the capacity to do this.
• I wish there was a way for the tool to warn me before performing a long-running task. For example if I want to re-organize a large table or rebuild an index for a table with millions of rows, it should warn me before executing it, so that I may choose to do it in a different way. Sometimes if I let these long operations run for too long, it freezes the program and crashes DBArtisan. I would rather run it on the DB server, and run it in background so that it doesn't time out, if DBArtisan gave me a warning before execution.
• Idera has taken over Embarcadero. I never heard of or dealt with Idera for support. I don't know if they have same the quality support as before.

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

I have never tried their support so the number above is meaningless

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

DBArtisan does not have an in-depth performance analyzer for databases.

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

• While it is expensive, it saves us a great deal of time in getting a lot of DB work done.
• The front end is reasonably powerful and significantly more polished than any of the free alternatives

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