TIBCO Business Studio vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest comparison

"The solution is excellent in providing a visual representation of a database and can generate DDL for implementing changes. We use DDL for logical purposes to review with business people, ensuring they have the required fields for processing. We also use it as a data dictionary for the physical data model to understand all the purposes of the terms. This helps us map the logical and physical terms with the business definition to understand our data."

"It's important to create standard templates — Erwin is good at that — and you can customize them. You can create a standard template so that your models have the same look and feel. And then, anyone using the tool is using the same font and the same general layout. erwin's very good at helping enforce that."

"Another feature of erwin is that it can help you enforce your naming standards. It has little modules that you can set up and, as you're building the data model, it's ensuring that they conform to the naming standards that you've developed."

"The solution’s code generation ensures accurate engineering of data sources, as there is no development time. Code doesn't even have to be reviewed. We have been using this solution for so long and all the code which has been generated is accurate with the requirements. Once we generate the DDLs out of the erwin tools, the development team does a quick review of the script line by line. They will just be running the script on the database and looking into other requirements, such as the index. So, there is less effort from development side to create tables or build a database."

"Any tool will do diagramming but I think the ability to put the stuff up in a graphical fashion, then think about it, and keep things consistent is what's valuable about it. It's too easy when you're using other methods to not have naming consistent standards and column consistent definitions, et cetera."

"Forward engineering, DDL generation, reverse engineering, and reporting are the most valuable features of the solution."

"The fitting model is very intuitive."

"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."

"The setup cost is definitely reasonable."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"The setup cost is definitely reasonable."

"I still use Visio for conceptual modeling, and that's mainly because it is easier to change things, and you can relax some of the rules. DM's eventual target is a database, which means you actually have to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, but in a conceptual model, you don't often know what you're working with. So, that's probably a constraint with erwin. They have made it a lot easier, and they've done a lot, but there is probably still room for improvement in terms of the ease of presentation back to the business. I'm comparing it with something like Visio where you can change colors on a box, change the text color and that sort of stuff, and change the lines. Such things are a whole lot easier in Visio, but once you get a theme organized in erwin, you can apply that theme to all of the objects. So, it becomes easier, but you do have to set up that theme."

"I would like to see the reporting capabilities be more dynamic and more inclusive of information. The API is very sparsely understood by people across the user community."

"The erwin ETL functionality has room for improvement when it comes to mapping databases with a classic entity-relationship model to a data warehouse model."

"In terms of improvements, support could have been better in terms of installation, especially of workgroups. We struggled quite a bit to get it up and running. Collaboration could have been better from an installation perspective, but it is trivial as compared to what we use it for. Other than that, I don't have much feedback. It works pretty well, and the fact that we've been using it for more than a decade shows that it is quite solid."

"We can only get licenses through partners."

"The Bulk Editor needs improvement. If you had something that was a local model to your local machine, you could connect to the API, then it would write directly into the repository. However, when you have something that is on the centralized server, that functionality did not work. Then, you had to export out to a CSV and upload up to the repository. It would have been nice to be able to do the direct API without having that whole download and upload thing. Maybe I didn't figure it out, but I'm pretty sure that didn't work when it was a model that sat on a centralized repository."

"As someone who has used it for a long time, I have seen stability vary from version to version."

"The only real complaint I have is the time it takes to do a database comparison on a large model. If they could speed that up, that would be the only thing I can think of that needs improvement."

"An artificial intelligence feature that evaluates the quality of the code developed with one click would definitely be good."

"An artificial intelligence feature that evaluates the quality of the code developed with one click would definitely be good."

"The interface is actually quite confusing."

"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."

"The pricing of the solution is cheap. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"The solution is expensive."

"Pricing is very high compared to any other product."

"Price-wise, erwin Data Modeler is okay. You can purchase a single license and it is not very expensive."

"The price of erwin Data Modeler is very expensive, in particular for this part of the world."

"The tool is expensive."

"erwin is expensive compared to other solutions. We are paying almost $6,000 per seat a month."

"For my company, the tool costs about 2,0,000 Euros for three years...If one is bad and ten is good, I rate the price as one out of ten."