erwin Evolve by Quest Reviews

1. Reverse Engineering and Complete Compare – to document database design and test for changes over time across many different platforms (including Big Data platforms and cloud like SQL Azure)
2. Workgroup Repository collection of data models allows research across models without worry about platform incompatibilities and provides easy KPIs about corporate data assets
3. User Defined Properties – Command line links: allows flexibility to link different aspects of the data model to other tools to build better communication tools
4. Model templates (that are able to stay linked with the model) with filterable update capabilities
5. Ability to add images to the model – to help make them communicate better
6. ERwin Portal Links – allows easy 'Find' for information pages about the published ERwin Data Model
7. ERwin Portal scheduled model harvest – allows for a ‘hands-off’ maintenance capability for Administrator.

1. We are providing EU support with our custom development product - so I can now provide both a Logical unified view of the design as well as the more segmented Physical view as the databases are deployed to multiple servers for PII separation, failover Up-time, and performance.
2. Having the data element library itself available for all departments and teams, helps build promote understanding of shared corporate data assets
3. The Portal gives both the Development and Business teams common grounds for communication

1. Support post Relational modeling styles – this might be solved for at a simple level with the ability to design and save ‘template’ entities with a pre-designed generic attribute set, including characteristics like PK, datatypes, nullability. Could be a grey’ed out menu option that is add on functionality. All these styles have both a logical and physical aspect. Ensembles might be solved with Subject areas. Seems that they are gaining use and showing up in conferences.

   1. Data Vault Modeling

   2. Ensemble Modeling

   3. Anchor Modeling

2. Add some ability to do conditional Visualization on the models and in reports (some ideas) – maybe as a specialized Theme or Diagram or Display

   1. Automatic entity colorization for rev eng volumetrics – Red large, Yellow Mid, Green small tables. Either custom banding or simple math by ERwin.

   2. Managed conditional display If … ‘pick a characteristic’ = ‘x’ then … like (If Schema Owner = ‘API’ then Theme = ‘API’)

   3. KPIs on Workgroup Repository more graphic – rather than just data reports. Counts of models, latest updates, license use, Portal use, Harvest errors. etc

3. Assist model management with Lineage mapping impact notification when source models available for impact assessment in Workgroup.

   1. Either a notification on opening a model ‘Source model used in lineage mapping has changed – Would you like to see the changes – (then open Complete compare to assist importing changes)

   2. Ability to flag for cascade updates from Source to Target models – like we can do with Erwin template models (again with notification – ‘Source model used in lineage mapping has changes – would you like to apply the changes?’

4. On upgrade– if the older models in the Workgroup Repository need to be upgraded, allow for a cascade update to newest version through the libraries. I just went through this with the latest Portal upgrade. Harvest processes were erroring out with a weird message and all I had to do was open and resave some of the older models. But it wasn’t intuitive and since the Workgroup repository includes older models, and the library is getting bigger – being able to just refresh old models to the new version of Erwin would be a great help.

5. Ability to schedule Reverse Engineer compares (using RE templates) to audit Production models

   1. Report on what models need changing

6. Add ability to launch erwin (get model) from Portal. This would help the teams doing reviews. Sometimes they have to get into the library tree bar to see where the model is to get the correct one from Workgroup.

7. Make Schema/Owner an option to show in Explorer bar for individual data models. Add ability to add to name like you can in the graphic view.

8. Provide APIs that would allow for metadata harvesting to build trend histories and research data marts.

I've personally been using it for 23 years. 1 year at the current version - ERwin Workgroup & Portal 9.7

The portal uses TomCat which we inadvertently upgraded to a newer version than could be used when installing another tool on the server. This wasn't easy to diagnose - but the ERwin tech team helped us figure it out. :-)

No issues.

No issues.

Great. They made sure that the initial product demos to Lytx were supported by a really experienced ERwin team - who could answer questions from the high levels that our managers asked to the deep technical ones from the DBAs. They also listened to the company needs and short/long term goals and sold a solution rather than just a tool. I didn't have to fend off high pressure to buy more than what was needed.

Excellent – they always work very closely with us. Their ‘Live Chat’ team is one that I depend on for fast answers - but they provide access to their really experienced teams when a problem is obviously complex. They also have a rich Knowledgebase for self-service research.

No.

Complexity lies in connectivity and supporting tool setup - which isn’t always intuitive.

We worked with Myriad Solutions for the initial installation and more recently the upgrade. Their team is fabulous! They go the extra mile to find solutions and make suggestions as they get to know your environment's quirks.

Unless you are a one person shop – always go with the Workgroup edition and Concurrent licensing, that puts your models in a database for protection and allows the team members to share a license.

Yes – ER Studio, Embarcadero.

This product is a cross platform database designer, data inventory control & metadata library, and supports soft link integration. It can be used to document or design metadata any type of data set and most data modeling styles. Doing your database design first and testing requirements on paper can be used to scope deployments in the correct sequence to support Agile teams.

- Excellent graphical support for very large data models, enabling our team to plot detailed and colorful data models containing hundreds of entities and as large as 3 feet by up to 40 feet in length. Despite building and maintaining many very large data models, we do not have problems with the stability of the graphical representation or layout, something we still encounter with a surprising number of other data modeling tools (when we're asked to try to port our data models to other tools by a few of our customers who are already using other tools when we start working with them).

- Robust dictionary and model comparison capability ("Complete compare") allow for sophisticated model management and configuration options.

- Optional repository-based Model Manager allows for coordination and version control across multiple (possibly geographically distributed) stakeholders.

- Longstanding commitment to open metadata access, either through included pre-builtimport/export connectors (for most common metadata-aware modeling tools, ETL tools, XML, etc.) or through sophisticated API (for programmatic access). This has been very important to our large customers and our team over the years as it has enabled metadata movement and synchronization between tools as and when required.

- Erwin can reverse and forward engineer from/to most supported versions of most widely used RDBMS, making deployment straightforward in most cases.

- Erwin has enabled us to build and manage a portfolio of over 1,000 large data models across more than 60 lines of business, many of which are related and synchronized. It has similarly enable our customers to start using selected subsets of our data models and incrementally grow their deployments over time, while also taking advantage of subsequent data model upgrades delivered by us.

- Erwin has enabled us to easily assist our customers in deploying our large data models across many different deployment platforms, on premise and in the cloud.

- We have been able to assist our customers in exchanging and synchronizing metadata between other modeling tools, repositories, ETL tools, MDM tools, BI tools, business glossaries, etc. to enable them to integrate with existing metadata artifacts and greatly facilitate metadata reuse in other metadata-aware products.

- Erwin could use better support for some NoSQL databases, JSON and other non-relational data structures. Based on a discussion I had with a member of Erwin's technical team at a recent tradeshow, it appears that some of the most requested connectors will be part of a forthcoming upgrade in early 2017. We and our customers await that release with interest.

17 years (since 1999)

No.

No, the 9.64.02 release we are currently using is very stable.

- Prior to a major upgrade to the underlying graphics engine in about 2010, we occasionally experienced slow performance when moving large numbers of objects (e.g. several hundred entities at a time) in very large models, but we worked with the Erwin technical team and the issue was resolved and has not been a problem in over 5 years of working daily with very large data models since then.

- We and our customers regularly use the "Complete Compare" function to compare and manage multiple large related models with no problems.

- We also use Erwin's metadata API to programmatically synchronize enhancements across as many as 100 large data models at a time with no problems.

Historically the Erwin product has been primarily sold through channels so we've had little interaction with Erwin's sales team. We are however very happy with the level of customer service we receive from the Erwin reseller we have used and recommend to our customers, Sandhill Consultants.

As longtime users of the Erwin product, our team rarely needs to communicate with technical support. However, when we have needed to speak with them, we have always found them to be responsive and knowledgeable. Several core members of the Erwin technical team have been there longer than we've been using the product (17 years), which I believe contributes to the high quality of support.

We previously used a data modeling product called Silverrun. We switched because most of our customers were using Erwin and because Erwin did a better job of staying current with most popular RDBMS for reverse and forward engineering.

Installation is straightforward.

We implemented Erwin ourselves and found it an easy process.

This review reflects my experience with and opinion regarding the Erwin product after many years of using it and several other popular data modeling tools. I received no financial incentive or other consideration for this review.

Complete Compare AND Bulk Edit.

The Bulk Edit allows us to bring in definitions from IBM's Business Glossary.

Would like to see canonical modeling supported for web services.

20+ year

None

None

None

Outstanding

Outstanding

I've used several other Modeling tool (Embarcadero an System Architect).

Straightforward

In-house