An intuitive design interface and capabilities supporting everyone from business users to technical architects make this data modelling tool stand out in the crowd
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
ER Studio Data Architect is a premiere choice tool for managing data models, data domains, and business glossaries across the organization. It's ease of use both to learn and to master make enforcing data modelling standards across the enterprise a simple task. We use ER Studio Data Architect to manage physical model naming standards (especially in sensitive and sometimes ambiguous shorthand naming conventions within hospital settings) as well as all data models within the organization. Its ability to import ETL mappings and manage data lineage is a powerful, overlooked feature that shined through where the ETL offering did not (we opted to use Data Architect over Informatica's Meta Data Management offering due to overhead and performance).
Pros
- It is a great tool for developing, managing, and maintaining data models at both the logical and physical level (I still do whiteboard drawings for conceptual although conceptual modelling is a capability of the team edition and above I believe)
- The naming conventions template greatly reduces physical modelling time as you can concentrate on logical naming conventions, and then publish your physical model by pushing it through the naming standards
- The ability to interpret ETL mappings goes a great way in providing data lineage to the business. This is often overlooked in organizations in favor of immediate gratification through reporting, then having to eventually rework due to auditing or other issues that may expose where corners were cut
Cons
- Relationships are a bit on the weaker side. Many times I found orphaned relationships that I could not get rid of, or additional columns that were automatically created during the push to the physical model that appear to be due to key constraint bugs
- There are a lot of bugs introduced when merging keys. I tend to model 2 tables for example logically, establish the relationship, and then merge the additional key column that is automatically created when establishing the relationship. This sometimes causes downstream issues with the physical model (creating duplicate columns with _1 appended)
- Meta-data could be improved. I find it hard to keep descriptions and other meta information clean when copying and pasting from other sources due to formatting tags being introduced on each object (font, size, color, etc.). The attachment feature comes in handy, however I am looking for the ability to cleanly document and map multiple sources to a single target while providing searchability and traceability
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
