In terms of the Smart Data Connectors, automating metadata for reverse engineering or forward engineering is a great capability that erwin provides. Keeping technology investments intact is something which is a very comforting for our clients and these capabilities help a client build on, rather than rebuild. That is one of the top reasons I go for Erwin, compared to the competition.

I used a couple of different Smart Data Connectors, and they were great. One of the Smart Data Connectors that we used was for our Microstrategy BI solution, so it was a Microstrategy Smart Data Connector. Microstrategy is our enterprise reporting tool, and a lot of the metrics were already built in different reports in Microstrategy. So, it made sense to use this connector to extract all the metrics that were already being used. By using this connector, we could connect to Microstrategy, pull all the metrics and reports from that, and then populate our business glossary with those details. This was a big advantage of using the Microstrategy Smart Data Connector. Another Smart Data Connector that we used was the Python Connector. It enabled us to build the data lineage. We already have a lot of ETL kind of processes built by using Python and SQL, and this connector can reverse engineer that and graphically show how the data flows from the source. This work was done by our data engineers or IT teams, but the business teams didn't understand how it is built. So, by giving them a visual representation of that, they became more data literate. They understood how the data flows from different tables and ultimately lands in the final tables.