IDERA ER/Studio Reviews

We maintain all of our enterprise models within ER Studio. This includes our data marts and our local systems. We have multiple people who use the web interface to look at the models.

Using this product has improved the way we maintain our models because they have a place where we can keep all of them, and they can be viewed using the web interface. Essentially, it has helped a lot because we have everything in one place

The feature that we like best is the model publishing.

The web interface allows everybody to view models that are stored on the team server.

The model diagram because very clumsy when you save it on the team server and the models are very big. It becomes difficult to enlarge and difficult to print.

Although they say that it supports concurrent users, we have issues while branching, merging, and performing check-in or check-out. It's not as seamless as it should be.

Now that we are all working from home and our repository is on the cloud servers, we are experiencing issues with performance.

In general, support for big data should be improved.

I have been using this product for the last three to four years.

I would say that it is 70% stable, with the remaining 30% having room for it to be more stable.

It is scalable, given that we are on the cloud. We are able to scale it up whenever we need, especially with the team server, without any issues.

We have at least 50 users who are actively working on models and using the web interface. We also have at least 30 different users who log in and look at our models, as guests. We haven't added them as users within the repository because they don't need access to it. Rather, they just use the web interface to see the models. These users intermittently come in, perhaps once or twice a week, instead of on a daily basis.

The technical support people are pretty good and I would rate them a nine out of ten. Whatever the tool is capable of, they are able to let us know about it.

Prior to IDERA, we were using erwin. We switched for several reasons, starting with the fact that we did not find the erwin web interface allowed us to see the models as well. The team server in IDERA is better and erwin did not have a very good method available for working with models concurrently between multiple users. Overall, we found that ER Studio is much better.

Initially, when we started with the 2016 version, we found that there was a learning curve but ER Studio support helped us with it. The 2018 version upgrade was very quick and nice. The 2017 version took longer than the 2018 upgrade, although it was fine.

My advice to anybody who is considering ER Studio is to look at the size of their models. If they have very large models then it may not be suitable because we are having performance issues in this case. On the other hand, if they have midsized models then I think it is pretty good.

Overall, this product is pretty good. It can certainly be better but it still has features that are quite good.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It isn't easy to compare the thousands of tables in the model against the database. The tool should improve the synchronization within the large organization

I have been using the product for one month. 

I would rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a five out of ten. 

The tech support team is helpful. 

Positive

I have used PowerDesigner before. The tool is not as specialized as Edera. 

The solution's setup is easy and straightforward. It took a couple of minutes to deploy the tool. 

I use the product's trial version. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. The tool is simple to use. 

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.

Our primary use case of this solution is to design our database.

This solution needs more precise documentation.

We are still testing the stability of the product.

The setup was straightforward but we lacked receipt of support from the solution. 

It is a good product but it needs improvement of the documentation process.

We use it for data modeling.

I always work in big corporations, and what I do is relatively small, it's enhancements. The company that I work for has many products and this is just one of them. 

The main benefit is that you can do things fast with it and that's very important. It helps reduce the overall time and meet the deadlines.

Also, IDERA keeps up with the versions of Oracle and SQL Server that I'm using. I mostly use SQL Server and when there are new features, a new type of index, for example, IDERA also includes them in upgrades of the data modeling tool.

The data modeling module is important to me because I am a database developer and designer. I also take part in designing applications and that always starts with data modeling. It's very fast, reliable, up-to-date, so easy to use, smooth.

The solution is also easy to explain to others and the graphics are good. Finally, the menu choices are also important. There are a lot of them and they are good.

I've not encountered any issues with its stability.

I haven't tested the scalability. I have hundreds of tables, but if you have thousands of tables I don't know how it would work.

The only thing I had an issue with was licensing, and the support was very good. They replied very quickly and it was very smooth.

A long time ago I use erwin. I switched at that time because it became too complicated to use. But that was a long time ago.

No issues with the initial setup.

It is priced fairly. It's around the same as erwin and other competitors' costs.

I evaluated Microsoft Visio.

I would recommend IDERA ER/Studio, but people in my profession are divided by their loyalties. I am loyal to this product, but if you talk to another developer who has been using erwin all his life, that person might say, "Hey, erwin is better." I say ER/Studio is good but in the world of developers, people still have to evaluate things for themselves.

I have no complaints. That's why I've been using it for so long. I rate it a nine out of ten. It's easy and fast to use.

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.

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.

We use it for data modeling. 

We have gone from having no diagrams to 50 submodels that we have been able to share with team members and even with our clients.

The modeling part of the tool. We use the solution to create data models which describe our company's data architecture. It is a mix of design upfront when we get changes. We also use the data models after we've implemented changes.

It does help in regards to redundancy with standardization across models.

The solution could be sped up, as it is a little slow (e.g., when it's doing its database compare). 

The screens are a bit outdated. They could use a new look and feel. 

It is stable.

It seems scalable. I have had no issues. The solution doesn't differ much whether we are dealing with a small database or a large one.

The technical support has been fine. I have only used them for licensing issues.

I switched from erwin to ER/Studio. I've also used Oracle Designer, K Studio and Quest Toad.

The initial setup was easy. I have used data modeling tools for the past 20 years, so it was easy to move from other tools to this one. It is an easy data modeling tool to use.

We have two users at my office who are DBAs, myself included. This solution takes up 10 percent of our roles for deployment and maintenance.

Our deployment time depends on the size of the project.

We did the implementation ourselves.

Our implementation strategy was to generate SQL out of the tools, so I could have scripts, which we could then deploy to other environments.

At my previous company using ER/Studio, a database compare took four hours before using the product and 15 minutes after using the product.

Pricing is expensive and on the higher-end.

We also looked at K Studio, Quest Designer, and SAP PowerDesigner. Until we switched over to ER/Studio, we were still working with erwin.

You will save time, switching from whatever product you're using.

It's the best data modeling tool out there. It's fast. It can do what I need it to do.

We connected to Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server (as data sources) to this solution.

I have plans to expand the use of the built-in tool functionality. However, I haven't had the time.

We use it for data modeling. It is the way we communicate requirements, both for gathering and presenting them. We also use it for putting together our metadata and publishing it.

There are a lot of different ways we use the tool. One of the ways is that we do auditing of what's been billed to production to make sure it matches what we have designed. And it has also improved things in that we have design requirements for the DBA.

Because of all the various things we use it for, it has a high value within the organization.

The most valuable features are the various features for different databases, but mainly those that enable me to represent the database to the development community and the business users.

It would be helpful if they could create a generic JSON database type, as a target database, rather than a specific one like Mongo.

Also, Business Objects doesn't seem to be very stable at the moment, so we've stopped using that.

We did not encounter stability issues in the past but lately, since they're undergoing the rewrite of their internal system, there is some stuff creeping in. We've had some stability issues in the last six months.

We haven't had any scalability issues.

Tech support hasn't been as good lately as it was in the past. It is down to "average."

Prior to using ER/Studio, there was ERwin in-house, but their tech support was horrible, their product was not very good. This was back in the early 2000s, so we switched over because ER/Studio was more flexible. It was able to reverse-engineer a database in under a minute, versus ERwin, which was taking over an hour. That performance was a big issue. Also, early on, and other than in the last six months, Idera's tech support was excellent.

I don't know enough about what the pricing is for other choices out there. I've only really worked on this one tool.

We looked at PowerDesigner, Oracle's native designer, and ERwin. We only did those three, four including ER/Studio. And this tool was, by far, at the time, the better one. Since that time, and now that we have more people in-house, ERwin, evidently, now has more features. I can't confirm or deny that, I don't know because I have never used ERwin. But, at the time, back in 2004, there was a big difference.

I really like ER/Studio personally, so for me, it's a nine out of 10. I like it because it doesn't let you make stupid mistakes - and it's easy to make a stupid mistake. The tool can save you a lot of trouble. The only other tool I used before this was Oracle Designer, back in the 90s. This is way better than that. I haven't used anything else, so I'm a loyal customer.