ABACUS, from Australian software company Avolution, is an enterprise architecture modeling tool.
N/A
ER/Studio
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
ER/Studio is a database development and management tool from Embarcadero Technologies (acquired by Idera) in California.
$1,470.40
one-time fee per user
Pricing
Avolution ABACUS
ER/Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Avolution ABACUS
ER/Studio
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Pricing for new customers only, first year maintenance included. Maintenance includes access to technical support and product updates for the defined period of the agreement.
Well suited scenarios include IT portfolio management, project portfolio management, enterprise architecture planning, modeling of business capabilities, using standard frameworks that ship out of the box such as TOGAF, and integration with SharePoint. Less appropriate scenarios would be detailed data modeling and using the tool expecting to get model drive code execution.
Data Architect is well suited at organizations of all sizes. It is never too early or unnecessary to enforce proper modelling and design standards on data solutions, and this tool will help that greatly by providing an industry leading data modelling tool, ability to import ETL mappings for data lineage, enforcing and managing naming conventions through the naming convention tool, and publishing of data dictionaries through the report publisher. I was successfully able to build models, provide traceability, and document source to target with lineage throughout for both the business (by providing business definitions in the descriptions), and technical teams (by documenting ETL instructions in text fields) along with field level mapping (by creating "Attachments" representing data sources, tables, and fields) providing easy search capabilities using business friendly terms
ER/Studio has the ability to provide consistent field names and data types through domains, which are templates. This provides a way to have consistent naming of common fields, like CreatedBy and the data types for the fields. They also have the ability to change all the fields that use that domain to a different data type.
ER/Studio provides the ability to create custom macros. These macros can be used to apply everything from standard fields based on domains to naming all constraints and indexes. I've also used a macro that comes with ER/Studio to spell check field and table names.
My favorite feature is the ability to compare your data model to databases for deployments of changes, and to other data models.
ER\Studio licensing can be cumbersome and upgrading from one version to another usually takes several phone calls and emails to the licensing group to get the update installed and running.
The repository can be slow when the model count gets larger. By large I mean 20 to 30 models.
A nice feature that I would like to see is table comments be displayed on the model along with the attributes. Currently you have to choose between the two.
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.
ER/Studio has had a positive impact on my project as we can develop the data model and have a clear understanding of business needs before we continue with the development phase.
