Avolution ABACUS vs. ER/Studio Data Architect

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Modelling the Enterprise through the creation of catalogues and matrices of Enterprise information
• Creation of views to supports strategy execution and decision making
• Central storage of Enterprise information
• Management of a agreed meta model

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• More standard connectors for integration with other modeling tools could be beneficial for companies having legacy tools/fragmented toolsets.
• Better automated diagramming features would be useful.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Highly knowledgable team and fast response times

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

- Microsoft tools are manual and data is not centralized

- ARIS is not as flexible as Avolution

- LeanIX is close, but lacks business content/accelerators that Avolution provides

- LeanIX is in the cloud and multi-user

Incentivized

ER/Studio is the most mature, reach in features and quality and therefore useful. Unfortunately, it lacks compatibility with AWS Redshift.

Incentivized

• Positive - time to value for EA activities
• Positive - robust decision making

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized