An intuitive design interface and capabilities supporting everyone from business users to technical architects make this data modelling tool stand out in the crowd
December 10, 2018
An intuitive design interface and capabilities supporting everyone from business users to technical architects make this data modelling tool stand out in the crowd
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ER/Studio Data Architect
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).
- 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
- 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
- Enforced modelling standards across the organization including naming conventions
- Provided data lineage through importing ETL mappings and documenting source definitions through attachments
- Published global data glossaries to business users providing business terminology to tables and fields
ER Studio Data Architect is a global leader in the data modelling space and most other solutions that have support for third party data models include support for ER Studio Data Architect file formats. Many of the features are a bit more intuitive than the competitors and several of our vendors were already using Data Architect themselves which helped solidify the choice.