IDERA ER/Studio Reviews

To develop an underlying platform upon which to base our data governance program by creating a central repository for maintaining and disseminating logical, physical models for our enterprise-wide databases.

We have been able to quickly create models for our enterprise-wide databases, even when some of them are third-party databases. We have been able to then modify those models, breaking them down to make them more understandable. Loading these models into the ER/Studio Team Server repository, it allows us to disseminate this information to the entire enterprise. 

Team Server allows us to further define those models through the use of glossaries and gives us the ability to collaborate as a data governance team to ensure that terms defined provide us a common understanding of our data. We are also able to document the data lineage and data flows of our data from one system to another.

• Modeling with Data Architect: We can quickly reverse-engineer a database from an existing database or create a model from scratch.
• Data lineage tracking: It allows us to identify upstream and downstream systems using data. This allows us to identify downstream impacts of making changes to data in a particular system, before the downstream systems break.
• Collaboration features in Team Server: With discussion threads, email notifications, and streams, we can collaborate with team members to make sure that models and glossaries are sufficiently defined to accurately and concisely reflect the meaning, purpose, etc. of our enterprise data.
• Change management: We can track changes to our data models and tie those changes back to specific tasks or efforts that we identify.

I would like to see better documentation/help for the Data Architect tool. 

Creation of tutorials would be nice. There are some features which are not as clearly defined as they should be.

One to three years.

Strong graphic and formatting capabilities which can be used to stylize/classify tables of different uses/purposes. Reverse engineering function is useful in examining undocumented legacy databases. Object creation scripting tool has plenty of useful option with the ability to save configuration sets for consistent database builds. Intuitive user interface provides for quick learning curve.

Our company designs and builds databases in ER/Studio before other database builds or other development. This provides for identifying potential issues long before any code has been written. Data models are often the basis for functionality discussions between the business, analysts, and developers.

The deployment and licensing facets of this product are beyond maddening, requiring even small organizations such as ours to install and maintain two server apps to handle real-time license enforcement and centralized (Tool Cloud) product launching. The documentation is poor and new installations are tedious, to say nothing of the need for network operations resources to maintain the server apps.

Nine years.

Countless licensing and app launching issues. Support was friendly enough, but that we needed them as often as we did was the real problem. We are a small company with four data modellers. No need for complicated licensing and deployment schemes.

The app itself is quite stable. On rare occasions, particularly where models grew large and complex over time, a model would go haywire and become corrupt or otherwise exhibit abnormal behavior. Luckily we could revert to the previous version from our source control system.

I've used Power Designer and ER Win in the past. PD was a decent app, if quirky. I'm not a fan of ER Win. It strikes me as a forgotten app that has been kicked around to too many owners over the years without proper investment in refactoring and improvement.

Complex in that it requires installation of two server-based apps on the network for licensing and centralized launch/deployment. The server requires download and application of license files generated by Embarcadero and manual definition and maintenance of licensed users. On the deployment side, the app distribution server downloads updated versions of apps and serves them to the Java-based launcher app on client machines. This app (end user Java app) was tedious and often an extremely slow performer. We opted for full local install where possible to avoid interaction with the launcher app. Our company has no need for cloud-based application distribution and launching.

Internal network operations team.

Over nine years, we have spent approximately $3K-$4K per year on each user (we have five data modelers currently).

ER Win and two others, although their names escape me as it was nine years ago.

Great product. Tedious implementation and maintenance. Ultimately worth it considering other options.

I am primarily using this solution for reverse engineering and database comparisons.

The interface is really simple to use and it allows me to pick and choose which tables I want to reverse engineer.

The visual presentation is a little too colorful and seems that it is dumbed down.

I would like to see support for creating macros in the way that erwin can.

It did not reverse engineer all of the data types correctly, although it was pretty close. The only mistake was with some Oracle table objects, where it incorrectly determined them to be character references.

I have been using the trial edition of IDERA ER Studio for about a month.

I am using ER Studio on a daily basis I think that is very stable. It reverse-engineered a large number of tables all at once, without any problems.

It seems that there would not have to be much for me to do if I wanted to expand my usage. I am the only person in the company using it at this time.

The initial setup is very straightforward and the deployment took less than an hour.

I deployed this solution, myself, and no additional staff is required for maintenance.

I am currently using the trial version, but this solution is definitely worth considering for the price point.

I am in the process of comparing this product to erwin and SAP PowerDesigner.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

On-premises

We use it to develop our data warehouse, it's the core server.

It's much easier to develop the database structure and change it on the fly, rather than doing it manually in SQL Server itself. That saves time.

The most important features are logical and physical models that we can compare and develop. Also, the Data Dictionary can be created out of your studio. Finally, database schemas help understand the logic that's behind the scene, behind the SQL tables. Especially when there are a lot of them, the schemas help everyone understand the business processes.

They is a lot of room of improvement. I have emailed and have asked for things but nothing has been done. For example, when there are some links to the external databases, if this database is not structured it is not uploaded. It gives me errors and I cannot see the view that was created on this structure and I cannot change those views, even manually. It skips the views. I have to ignore those views. I cannot re-upload them because it gives me an error.

Another situation is that I need, and I would like to upload, a database with about 3,000 tables. It takes so much time and, finally, it freezes the whole solution so that I actually cannot work with that environment. For the data warehouse, it's fine, because I have 20 or 30 tables. But, when I reverse-engineer the database with 3,000 tables, it freezes and it's hard to upload and reverse-engineer such environments in ER/Studio. 

Those are the two main problems that I encounter today.

One to three years.

I have not encountered any issues with the stability of the product.

As I mentioned, I cannot upload the 3,000-table database. It cannot work with that.

Overall, technical support is okay. It's fast and usually, within four or five hours, I get a reply.

The setup was very easy. Everything was fine during the installation process.

I think the pricing matches what we get from the product. It is good value.

Licensing is a bit of a complicated process because there are three different types of licenses and sometimes it's a bit confusing. For example, when we had to reinstall Windows, and they had to contact support so that they reissue the license for me, that was not easy. It would be easier if I had the number and I could use that number for the computer, somehow. It should connect to the hardware, not to Windows. Because each time I need to update Windows, they need to contact support to reissue licenses or switch to another type of license. They mention that there are additional charges for this. It's not an easy process for users. It should be way easier.

I considered erwin software and I compared different functionalities and installed a trial version before choosing this software. I analyzed and found out that this software would match our needs more, in terms of flexibility and the features that it allows us to do. Also, I like that we have logical and physical modeling. We can have two separate environments for different purposes to develop the structures.

Any advice would depend on the infrastructure, but just start using it more and more. It's mainly for developing databases. If you have a smaller number of tables and all of them are relational, you may not need this software. But, if you have a data warehouse that needs to be developed and you need to frequently implement changes to the databases, it will help.

I rate the solution a rating of eight out of ten. I would consider it one of the best solutions on the market.

There are only a handful of ERD features that I’ve needed over the years that ER/Studio DA didn’t support. It’s flexible, intuitive for the newbie and yet supports the complexity required of a seasoned database designer, and offers a clean sophisticated presentation.

The work of the database architect is complex. ER/Studio DA supports in a single application everything from taxonomy and data dictionary definitions to conceptual, logical, and physical data models, relational and dimensional models, reverse engineering from legacy database structures, merging and comparison between database versions, exporting of ERD images and data dictionaries and DDL from physical data models, and it does so at a reasonable price point for such a polished and feature-rich offering.

Things that come to mind that I’ve not been able to do in prior projects include:

• Support for SQL Server filtered indexes, both a means to effectively represent this in a data model and have it produce the filtered index in the rendered DDL
• Support for some of the open source RDBMS for reverse engineering and migration

I’ve used ER/Studio at various clients since 2008.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

While they weren’t always able to solve my issue (feature limitations not bugs/education issues), when I did reach out to Embarcadero they were always extremely responsive and professional.

I’ve also used ErWin, Powerdesigner, Toad Data Modeler, MS Visio, and Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. ER/Studio has the features and the price point that is easy to realize ROI quickly.

There were issues with the licensed server, but after that is was smooth sailing.

We did it in-house.

Within a week of installation I had reverse engineered several existing databases into physical data models with basic data dictionaries and published them on the company wiki. The perception of value was extremely high.

As long as the tool natively supports the RDBMS databases you use, and you have someone that can support the licensed server, it’s a great solution.

The ability to define a set of domain definitions and group them in folders is a valuable feature. There is also a Macro (VB script) feature that allows you to automate many features that can save a lot of time.

Although the tool allows for many different options as far as the what can be displayed on the model, it would be nice if they allowed for entity objects (attributes, indexes, keys, etc.) as well as the textual definition of the object. The current design only allows one or the other. I like to have a little verbiage on each entity included in the model that describes it purpose, this is allowed in the tool but you can't show both the entity structure and the text at the same time without creating a separate text object and placing the text in it.

I've been personally using this product for 9 Years.

Deployment can be complicated with their licensing model. I typically have to call tech support to get the correct files and licensing all straightened out.

The repository which is used to store the models can slow down when multiple models are added. This has improved with later releases but it is still slow at times.

Customer Service:

Customer service is very good but they're a west coast company and we're on the east coast and I have to wait until later in the morning before I can talk to a support person.

Technical Support:

Technical support is typically very good.

I had prior experience with Sybase's Power Designer tool at a former employer. When I came to this company they had other Embarcadero tools and were interested in using a single vendor for SQL Server development.

Installation of the product itself is straight forward although the licensing process is awkward and confusing at best. If you have a workstation license that's not to bad, but we have a WS and 2 different concurrent licenses, which requires a license server set up and getting all the proper installations products requires (me anyway) to contact the support to get the correct files and the correct licensing information.

If you have a repository setup that increases the process even more.

I'm the administrator for our ER/Studio setup for our IT department, we have 5 or so actual users of the tool.

Fairly expensive tool and licensing setup is cumbersome.

Sybase Power Designer

It's a great tool for modeling and I'm generally very happy with its features.

I have experience working with various data architecture tools, and ER/Studio is one of them that I use in this capacity. We use it either to help an organization understand what data it has got or to design a database.

It does the job. However, it doesn't work as well as other solutions.

What needs the most improvement are semantic lineage and usability.

I began working with IDERA ER/Studio approximately eight years ago, and have about three years of experience with it.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

I have experience working with SAP PowerDesigner and erwin.

It is on par with erwin, although I think that I prefer erwin. It is nowhere close to SAP PowerDesigner.

To this point, I've only set up trial versions, and I've not set up or installed it for an enterprise.

However, I'm probably going to be doing that in the next two, three weeks.

The price of this product is okay.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to understand what your requirements are of the system, of whatever tool you're going to select. There are loads of people and organizations that have bought this product and used it, and that's dependent upon their requirements, their needs.

Plenty of others have bought SAP PowerDesigner. Personally, and I'm self-employed, or a freelance contractor, I invested more money and decided on SAP Power Designer.

Overall, I don't like any of the features and I think that it's a poor system.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

On-premises