Re: ERD generation tool

I've used the release of Embarcadero's ERSudio that was new about two months ago. It is OK if you really just want to do modeling and have relatively low expectations for some of hte more advanced capabilities of such tools. If does a decent job with diagrams and its rather simple standard reports, but it does not do a lot of things you might want.

• It is completely ignorant of packages. It will reverse engineer and let you create procedures, and functions, but has no concept of a package. If you reverse engineer all the code from a schema, you will get all the components, but not within the context of their packages.
• It has this very annoying habit of putting extraneous comments on all store code. It adds a comment that looks something like: "-- ---------- WARNING! Do not delete this line! -----------------" for each "begin" or "end" in every PL/SQL routine - for no rational reason whatsoever!
• It cannot handle obejcts (CLOBs, BLOBs, ...) that are not stored inline. If you place CLOBs in a different tablesapce form the rest of the row, you will have to manually manipulate the DDL.
• It has no schema-schema comparision capabilities, only schema-model.
• Examining the results of schema-model comparision is extremely awkward, time consuming, and aggravating. One has to continually "drill down" in a miniscule window using the "Windows Explorer" type interface to see anything meaningful.

There are some other significant deficiencies also. I talked to them about all these and more. What I got was the same answer that I got two years ago also. "We'll put it on the enhancement request list." or "We've been intending to do that."
Personally, I think that packages have been around long enough that a multi-thousand dollar per seat tool should be able to handle them by now!

Unfortunately, I don't know of any great modeling tool right now. Designer does everything, but definitely has some quirks. If you use another RDBS, it probably won't handle it well. In addition, it wants to do things its own way, not your way. Some also say it has the world's most obtuse interface. Simply sit someone that is familiar with modeling, but unfamiliar with Designer, down in front of the GUI and see how long it takes them to generate a readable ER diagram! (To make this "fair", compared to other tools, don't give them any documentation other than the online help, but start it up and connect it to a database before you turn it over). It could be days, perhaps weeks!

Don Granaman
[OraSaurus]

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 12:48 PM

ERWin and ERStudio are basically in the 3,000 to 4,000 price range, depending on what add-ons you take and yearly maintenance license.

When I reviewed them in 2001Q4, ERStudio was the only one that had a network option. In other words, you can install the software on every PC in the company but only X amount of users can use it at the same time. So that has some appeal, if you have a lot of people that need to be able to use the software but not at the exact same time. Sort of like MTS...:)

Quest's QDesigner was probably the least user friendly, but it has some slick capabilties. For example, if the current version doesn't support a new Oracle index type, then it's no problem, since you can edit the SQL template that is used to create a particular index.

ERStudio was easy to use, and seemed to be well developed. The sales guy went over my head when he didn't think he was going to make the sale. Regardless, we have no budget so nothing was purchased.

ERwin 4.0 was a disappointment. It seems like they polished up 3.5.2 and added a new reporting capability, and that took them several years. Let's all thank CA for not much. Besides the sales guy was a total jerk.

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Author: Don Granaman
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