ER/Studio Data Architect vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
ER/Studio Data Architect
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
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help data professionals optimize SQL Server database performance in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SQL Sentry delivers metrics to help users find and fix database performance problems and provides scalability, boasting demonstrated success monitoring 800+ SQL Server instances with one monitoring database. With SQL Sentry, the user can monitor: SQL Server Azure SQL Database SQL Server Analysis…
$0
Free
Pricing
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
$0
Free
SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
Per year per database (annual subscription)
SQL Sentry
1,450
Per year per instance (annual subscription)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing for new customers only, first year maintenance included. Maintenance includes access to technical support and product updates for the defined period of the agreement.—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Considered Both Products
ER/Studio Data Architect
Chose ER/Studio Data Architect
ER/Studio was difficult to learn at the beginning, but that was 7 years ago. I have used it across many companies since then, and It is really easy to use. I found it much easier to learn than Erwin as well.
SolarWinds SQL Sentry

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
SQL Performance Monitoring
Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
ER/Studio Data Architect
-
Ratings
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
8.4
102 Ratings
1% above category average
Performance dashboard00 Ratings9.2102 Ratings
Intelligent alerting00 Ratings7.996 Ratings
Top SQL00 Ratings8.6102 Ratings
Historical trend data00 Ratings8.6100 Ratings
Virtualization support00 Ratings8.764 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Small Businesses
Egnyte
Egnyte
Score 7.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.1 out of 10
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.1 out of 10
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(5 ratings)
8.6
(102 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(16 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
7.5
(14 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(8 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
ER/Studio Data ArchitectSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Likelihood to Recommend
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
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
Read full review
SolarWinds
This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
Read full review
Pros
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
  • 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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
  • The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
  • Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.
Read full review
Cons
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
  • 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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at.
  • They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off.
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Likelihood to Renew
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product
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Usability
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
I accept that the flexibility of the alerting comes at a price. Other than the alerting SQL Sentry's interface is intuitive. Connecting to a new SQL instance, given that all the needed ports are open in your firewalls is straight forward. Reviewing the performance and queries for an instance is available in with a right click. As you dig in new tabs are created to present the detailed data. I find the ability to filter and rollup metrics on a query very helpful in dealing with the "it's running slow". You can easily compare the metrics of run times for the same query to let the user know, it's probably data your doing a billion reads instead of the usual 100 thousand.
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Reliability and Availability
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.
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Performance
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem
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Support Rating
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
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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SolarWinds
From their infancy as a smaller company to now as a global player they have always kept focus on prioritising he customer. They know their product and the technology it supports and are easily accessible for both resolving problems with the product all the way to adding value through additional training and assisting with getting return on investment through utilisation of the many features the product provides.
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In-Person Training
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
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Implementation Rating
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).
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Alternatives Considered
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
ER/Studio is the most mature, reach in features and quality and therefore useful. Unfortunately, it lacks compatibility with AWS Redshift.
Read full review
SolarWinds
SQL Sentry offers more features and is customize-able to fit our business needs. It has more centralized management and support. The company's technical support is also top notch. It is also worth mentioning that SentryOne Team Blog is an excellent source. One can find lots of valuable troubleshooting skills on the blog site - very educational and informational.
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Scalability
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.
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Return on Investment
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
  • 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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible
  • It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources
Read full review
ScreenShots

ER/Studio Data Architect Screenshots

Screenshot of Logical data models in ER/Studio Data Architect.Screenshot of Data catalog in ER/Studio Data Architect.Screenshot of Data glossaries in ER/Studio Data Architect.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL