IDERA ER/Studio Reviews

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

Reverse and Forward Engineering are very important. The former provides a facility to generate the overall design from an existing database. The latter allows the user to 'round-trip' changes from the model to a database so as you make changes these result in actual physical changes to the database structure.

It allows for maintaining a data dictionary, to enforce naming standards, and has a built-in macro facility to make it easier to do complicated, repetitive tasks quickly and easily.

The print facility is a little lacking. It can be trying at times to get that perfect ERD printed on a plotter.

I started using ER/Studio in 2003 - so about 12 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Very good. They're pretty easy to work with.

Technical Support:

Excellent. Over the years as I've had problems with their products I always get the same employee - a great guy who knows the product.

I've used them all (I think). CA's ERWin is probably the nearest competitor. ERWin works OK, but at that time was $4,500 a seat vs. $1,800.00. It was no contest.

It's very easy to get started. Anyone who can install a software product to a laptop or PC can install ER/Studio.

It was done in-house.

We haven't calculated the ROI.

There are only a few companies providing enterprise grade products in this area and Embarcadero is one of three. I think it's the best due to pricing and good overall support. It has the main features needed for this kind of work and is often seen as a leader.

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.

Reverse engineering existing databases. I use the reverse engineering features to map existing databases to understand their structure and make improvements.

One example is the use of the product to make extracts and split databases, and we were selling parts of the company to other regions of other companies. It made the process more efficient and faster and less costly.

I don't have any specific ideas about how to improve the product. I always have the upgrades and every upgrade comes with some improvements and it's good.

I've used both products for over 10 years probably between 10 and 14 years, I don't remember the exact number.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

10/10.

Technical Support:

10/10.

The previous standard was Your Studio by CA, and I used that until I discovered the alternatives and immediately worked with the standards committee to include it and the standards for the company. I chose this product because it's ease-of-use an excellent support.

Initial set up was pretty straightforward, and it looks for database connections that are already configured on your machine and automatically sets them up once it's installed great feature.

I implemented just my own copy I didn't do it large-scale implementation. Other people within the company use it but it's independent for each user to set their own environment up I didn't have any problems or don't have a particular recommendations for other companies it's pretty straightforward.

The initial base price is a little bit high, and my recommendation is that once you've licensed the base, to keep the maintenance renewed because that's a much more reasonable annual cost.

My advice would be to use the Technical Support they're very good if you've got questions they're always there to help.

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.

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.

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.