We plan to migrate to erwin solution in the near future. I would not recommend it.

I rate SAP PowerDesigner a five out of ten.

I work with both SAP PowerDesigner and ER/Studio.

I'm a user of SAP PowerDesigner, but in the past, I've worked for an SAP partner.

I'm working with the latest version of the solution.

I'm a personal user and not a corporate user of the tool, so I have no plans to increase the usage of SAP PowerDesigner.

I advise anyone planning to use the tool to undergo training first. SAP PowerDesigner is not challenging to use as long as you do the training for at least one week, which helps you understand how to use the tool better and all its features.

My rating for SAP PowerDesigner is eight out of ten because it's a great tool. It's stable. You only need to understand one aspect to understand all its features. My clients and I find SAP PowerDesigner great to use.

I'd advise others that, when you are considering licensing if you need bulk licenses, you can easily get a deal from PowerDesigner. You can easily negotiate with them since they do like to negotiate if you are buying in bulk. 

When you are doing this negotiation, at that time, you can negotiate a contract in which they will be responsible for implementing it in your environment. If you are doing the installation on your own, you can ask for technical support that will provide quick responses during the implementation to avoid waiting on tickets during setup.

I rate this solution a six out of ten.

Overall, I rate PowerDesigner between 8 and 9, acknowledging its strengths but noting room for improvement.

I would rate PowerDesigner an eight out of ten.

It would be beneficial if this tool became more popular for developers in the future.

I rate SAP PowerDesigner a ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

My company has implemented SAP PowerDesigner and no longer requires any other data modeling tool.

I'm using the desktop version of SAP PowerDesigner, version 16.5.7.

In the company, more than one hundred people use SAP PowerDesigner. My company only has twenty-two licenses, so most users rely on mobile licenses.

One person can handle the deployment and maintenance of SAP PowerDesigner.

I advise anyone looking into using SAP PowerDesigner to consider the only constraint that erwin Data Modeler could overcome and SAP PowerDesigner couldn't. erwin Data Modeler can generate the ALTER statements apart from the CREATE statements. In contrast, SAP PowerDesigner only generates the CREATE statements, which is why people prefer to use erwin Data Modeler. You also need to consider your budget. Cost-wise, SAP PowerDesigner is better than erwin Data Modeler.

My rating for SAP PowerDesigner is eight out of ten.

My company is a customer of SAP PowerDesigner.

This solution offers good documentation and some cool usage types. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten because learning how to use this solution is easy. However, there have been some difficulties, especially with visibility of changes. I haven't been using other modeling tools so it makes it challenging to compare this solution to others.

I would advise you to just start using SAP PowerDesigner because it's intuitive. You have to be a software engineer if you want to use it; you have to know what you're doing. You can't use it as a casual user. However, the models use standards, so they're not difficult to use once you know what you're doing. If you want to design a database, there are other tools that have similar conventions, but SAP's implementation is intuitive and easy to understand. So, my advice is to just directly use it.

Apart from some improvements needed to integrate better with open source systems, SAP PowerDesigner is an excellent tool. It's very easy to use and is very stable. I would give it a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use 10 to 20 experienced people for the maintenance of the solution. However, the amount of people needed depends on what needs to be worked on. We have other teams that work on the tool, such as developers.

My advice to others is they should try out the solution, it's a good tool. This solution is priced low and if it works for their use case then it is better than paying for a more expensive solution. If your requirements are too high, you can't expect this tool to meet all of your needs, it does not have all the features. You have to go for other options if your requirement needs more features.

I rate SAP PowerDesigner a seven out of ten.

I would not recommend this solution to others who are considering it. 

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten. 

The key thing is really about the use case or the requirements. We are into enterprise modeling and we are looking at sharing the models and those are the requirements that shift the evaluation criteria. For those looking at stand-alone models, they may not be looking at sharing these, mainly they just want to produce their models and things, so those criteria will differentiate selecting the different products. And whether you have a large team of people or you are focusing on only a few players in a small team, that will also determine your criteria for selecting the product. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

When I began using PowerDesigner, it was an independent product. Since that time, SAP acquired it. It is a very solid product that does both data modeling and business process modeling.

My advice for anybody who is implementing PowerDesigner is to make sure that the central repository for versioning models is on a high-bandwidth network with a solid database backing it up.

In summary, this product gives you all of the features that a modeler would require to produce both logical and physical data models. There really is not a lot that is lacking and my only complaint is about the versioning repository. Of course, this is only a problem when we are working remotely. If there is a large model with perhaps 600 tables and 2,500 attributes, then it is going to be very demanding on bandwidth.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I certainly recommend using this product, although it wasn't cheap so cost is a consideration. Price is a complaint that I have for most design tools in the IT world, as most of them are extremely expensive. Corporations and large companies can use them effectively.

For me, the GUI is definitely a pleasure. At the same time, there is a steep learning curve when dealing with bigger and bigger systems. Fortunately, the tool helps with that.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I would highly recommend this product to be used in each and every application system where you have to design a relational database. It doesn't matter which relational database as you can use it for MSSQL, Oracle, Postgres.

There are over 50 or 60 different tools like SAP PowerDesigner, but most of them are limited to maintaining a few relational databases like Oracle or MSSQL. But PowerDesigner, as well as erwin can be sued with many different relational databases. This makes it easy to switch and maintain the logical level and then create the DDL for Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, for DB2, or DB2W.

I am using just part of SAP PowerDesigner as a tool. This is because it offers some additional capabilities, like business engineering. Other additional capabilities that I never used because there were additional tools for that.

Whether we use Powerdesigner or some other different tool, it's impossible to build an enterprise data model for big application systems. For example, a CIF covering the count and the post.

If it's loans, once we have a database with over ten entities, it's very hard to do it manually. You have to work with a tool to create a proper data model, and then a proper database with properly defined entities, primary keys, relationships, and foreign keys. You must have a tool. It's impossible to do it manually.

Once such a data model is created, it becomes the source. When trying to understand the beats revolving around magnetic media, you don't have to use the relational data model and the logical data model to understand the data. Once you understand the data, you know the application system. The data is basically a PowerDesigner. The main usage is to design and maintain the data model, the logical data model, and the physical data model.

The physical data model is achieved by pushing a button, and the tools will automatically create the DDL. You would just have to implement it as it is. You don't have to write the DDL manually. The business understanding and the business requirements are translated into the physical design one by one. The implementation is according to the business requirement, as a business understanding of the system.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SAP PowerDesigner a nine.

I'm not using the latest version of the solution, I'm using the one that came out before version 16.

When we go to specific clients if they would like us to define it or some other product, what we do is we model whatever things that they want, inside those particular tools. Some of the tools don't have the entire modeling capability that PowerDesigner offers.

If a company has a team of people or even one single consultant who has the capability to design business architecture, software architecture, database architecture, or infrastructure architecture, they should go for this particular product. None of the other products offer all of these capabilities in one tool.

This is especially true when you design on one model. The architects creating them can pull into the next model - whatever they want to create. For example, if I'm designing a business process diagram, we will be able to capture some data architecture. When we reach the data architecture part of it, all the data items, whatever they already created in the business architecture, can be pulled. It automatically creates the database from the ER diagram.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

If you have the money for it, buy it. If you were budgeted, it would be a worthwhile investment.

I would rate PowerDesigner an eight out of ten. It is very complete and robust. If you're an SAP shop, without question you'd want to use it because you can generate your ETL code as well. That also separates conceptual, logical, and physical modeling really well. I don't know if it's as complete though as erwin's solution. But erwin's solution is evolving and getting better. PowerDesigner has some room to improve, but it's still pretty solid.

I would not recommend this solution to others.

I rate SAP PowerDesigner a six out of ten.

I rate SAP PowerDesigner a ten out of ten.

A powerful modelling solution has to be selected, implemented and managed in the same way as any other enterprise software - before you evaluate tools make sure you've documented your modelling process and the metadata you need to manage. Run a 'Proof of Concept' first - so you actually know what you're letting yourself in for and how much work you may or may not have to do to get it to work the way you want.

It is a great product to use, but the client does not really need to purchase the software, as the consultant can reverse engineer the database, and then create the data model and documentation in order to deliver to client. The client can use the read-only version of PowerDesigner.

Before deploying PowerDesigner, do not underestimate the initial analysis of WHAT will be modeled, as well as HOW and BY WHOM. Are your users prepared well enough for the transition to PD (training, potential changes in the modeling process, ...)?

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is not to deploy PowerDesigner fully by yourself. Allow an experienced vendor consultant to explain all of the features and possibilities of the tool to you, and then just decide what and how you want or need to use.

We don't have a business relationship with SAP. We prefer to keep our relationship independent and have no direct relationships with them at the moment.

It's certainly a good strategy to migrate to this solution from another tool, but I wouldn't recommend anyone start using it by trying out a trial-and-error strategy. An organization must think first about the migration strategy if they already have a tool and want to migrate before they start. A trial and error approach will waste a lot of time. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's easy to use and you can get good pictures out of it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give PowerDesigner a nine.

Use source reference models for your industry and implement as library models.