IDERA ER/Studio Reviews and Pricing - page 5

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Senior Consultant with 51-200 employees

Jul 26, 2015

You can compare your models against the database, but the repository can be slow with big data sets.

What is most valuable?

Ease of use
It looks good enough
Ability to create HTML reports
Ability to compare the model against the database

What needs improvement?

Repository causes continuous problems, as it's slow and sometimes crashes.
Integration with Active Directory does not function perfectly.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for five years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

If you use repository, it can get slow with big data models.

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How are customer service and support?

I have received answers to issues within a week from a report.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Nope, and I hear that this is the best data modelling tool for data warehouse scenarios.

How was the initial setup?

It's straightforward without the repository.

What about the implementation team?

I did everything, from the installation to using it.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are partners with Embarcadero.

it_user277026 - PeerSpot reviewer

Senior Consultant with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 22, 2015

We can maintain a data dictionary, enforce naming standards, and have a built-in macro facility, but printing ERDs on a plotter needs improvement.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

It was done in-house.

What was our ROI?

We haven't calculated the ROI.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user92238 - PeerSpot reviewer

Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 20, 2014

Great product. Tedious implementation and maintenance. Ultimately worth it considering other options.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

Nine years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

Internal network operations team.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Over nine years, we have spent approximately $3K-$4K per year on each user (we have five data modelers currently).

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

ER Win and two others, although their names escape me as it was nine years ago.

What other advice do I have?

Great product. Tedious implementation and maintenance. Ultimately worth it considering other options.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user91548Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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May 4, 2015

I would like to whole-heartedly agree with issues concerning installation and setup. It has been very difficult to get ER/Studio to work properly with a server license for use in VDI. I work for a very large organization where the many groups we need to deal with are less than quick to get things done. Due to the restrictive nature of VDI, we had to go through a tedious process of changing firewall rules to allow ER/Studio to see the database servers used for reverse-engineering. We finally had to convince the powers that be (against their policy) to allow us to use VPN so that the application could run locally and access the network only as needed. Licensing this product can be a real pain, especially if you have to run a server license with the separate Embarcadero License Server installed. It definitely needs to be easier and simpler. It is a powerful and very functional product, but getting it to work correctly in VDI has been a real chore.

it_user92238 - PeerSpot reviewer

Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 5, 2014

Great product however their delivery & licensing mechanisms are abysmal

I have been using it for the last eight years, after previously having used PowerDesigner and ERWin. It is a great product, no doubt.

Embarcadero's delivery & licensing mechanisms, however, are abysmal. Licensing servers, app distribution servers, sluggish Java apps to launch the actual tools and poor documentation of how to configure and use these requiring repeated CS calls.

This is not to mention that there are no slimline versions (read: cheaper) that could be used by smaller companies to do physical/logical modeling for a single platform. I bet this discourages many companies from adopting a design-first approach in favor of only creating data models as after-the-fact documentation on occasion with lesser tools.

Perhaps Embarcadero is not interested in anything smaller than the full enterprise market?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user91548 - PeerSpot reviewer

Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 23, 2014

Huge advantage is that it gives you full access to its automation model.

What has proven to be a HUGE advantage of ER/Studio that was not really evaluated at the time we chose it is that it gives you full access to its automation model. This allows it to be controlled through code (VBA) in programs like MS Access. One reason this is helpful is that we work with huge models of around 1500 entities, 1500 tables, and 25,000 attributes and columns. We often find ourselves needing to make mass updates, and this is easily done with code in a tiny fraction of the time needed to do it manually. Another use is we can extract metadata in code and load it directly to an Oracle database (using MS Access) to publish for developers on the other side of the planet.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Oracle developer at OKsystem a.s.

May 17, 2023

A stable and simple solution with straightforward setup

Pros and Cons

"The tool is simple to use."

"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"

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the product for one month.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

The tech support team is helpful.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I use the product's trial version.

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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