ER/Studio Data Architect vs SAP PowerDesigner

Likelihood to Recommend

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

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Jody Gitchel

Senior Data Solutions Architect

Laser Spine InstituteHospital & Health Care, 501-1000 employees

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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.

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Gene Baker

Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer

WySTAR Global Retirement Solutions, a Wells Fargo CompanyFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Pros

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.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 51-200 employees

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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.

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Gurcan Orhan

Principal Data Warehouse Consultant

BlackSoftInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Cons

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.

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Jay Coppola

Database Architect

UConn HealthHospital & Health Care, 5001-10,000 employees

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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.

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Gene Baker

Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer

WySTAR Global Retirement Solutions, a Wells Fargo CompanyFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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Support Rating

ER/Studio Data Architect 9.0

Based on 2 answers

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.

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Jay Coppola

Database Architect

UConn HealthHospital & Health Care, 5001-10,000 employees

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SAP PowerDesigner 10.0

Based on 2 answers

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!

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Gene Baker

Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer

WySTAR Global Retirement Solutions, a Wells Fargo CompanyFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

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

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Michael Romm

Principal Data Architect

IntuitComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees

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Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler : Unfortunately this tool only supports Oracle Databases as a target database, but has many features similar to SAP Sybase PowerDesigner.erwin Data Modeler: Has some issues when switching from Conceptual Model to Physical Model, Impact Analysis, and formatting copy and pasting.Vertabelo: Only supports online models and from a governance perspective, it is impossible for me to connect my target database with an online application because of company policy and regulation requirements.

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Gurcan Orhan

Principal Data Warehouse Consultant

BlackSoftInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

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.

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