Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Enterprise Architect can be used to capture business requirements, design and management of all successive models, algorithms, process flows/workflows, design of business data objects and other artifacts. The strong point is the ability to link the items in all models with each other, the more time the analysts and designers "invest" into making nice and clearly defined models, the higher the future pay-off by any successive changes to the systems. Enterprise Architect is not a good tool for capturing rather unstructured business requirements, use e.g. Confluence or other solutions instead. EA should comprise the extracted models with very little unstructured information. Management of the changes process should not be done in Enterprise Architect, rather use JIRA/Confluence or similar.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Open Architecture - A wide and extensive set of options, plug-ins and customization options make Sparx EA more of a tool kit than just a tool. Most tools allow customization but Sparx EA is built from the ground up with this in mind. Wide variety of formats, lexicons, standards and data import export capabilities allow different roles to interact with the information in different ways. Automated report generation allows architects and designers to spend less taking on word processing and more time on performing architecture and design. Read full review Cons 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. Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Needs someone that is very conversant with business modelling terminology Read full review Support Rating 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!
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review The support team of Sparx EA, based in Australia, is always willing to help and give direction.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review BiZZdesign represents a different new concept to enterprise architecture, its gravity center is not technical modelling, but rather a view on capturing the whole end-user experience or customer journey. It also allows to grasp areas as internal company capabilities, required for adoption/changes and operation of the solution, uses the same Archimate modelling language. This solution is in my opinion a new generation enabling to not only design the solutions, but also manage the whole application portfolio with respect to capabilities and requirement parameters.
Read full review Return on Investment Standardization of models Impact Analysis Graphical User Interface Ease of deployment Read full review This program speed up the development process. It generates the actual code with my model classes after modeling Read full review ScreenShots