erwin Data Modeler vs. SAP PowerDesigner

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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

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

Incentivized