Re: ER/Win vs Designer/2000 - Which is better?

In article <33495C83.3FC8_at_gte.net>, Robert Miller <rwmiller_at_gte.net> wrote:
>Instead of generating declarative referential integrity constraints when
>foreign keys are specified, the thing create a trigger for every foreign
>key. This is not desirable in Oracle, and in earlier releases, there
>was a limit on the number and type of triggers that can be placed on one
>table. Also, on earlier releases, triggers were run-time interpreted
>and this would have created unnecessary performance hits.

I believe this is just a matter of changing your preference in ERWin. In the last version I used (I think it was 2.4) it was possible to generate normal foreign keys. At that point using the trigger generators was problematic and I avoided using the tool for that purpose.

Having used both ERWin and Designer 2k, I will second the basic sense posted here: ERWin is a smaller tool with a narrower scope. It has the look and feel of a Windows program and you can do a lot with fairly quickly. I enjoyed using it and stopped primarily because my employer was unwilling to pay the fairly steep maintenance costs. Designer 2k can do most of what ERWin does and a lot more. I say "most of" simply because it's a lot clumsier and therefore if you need to do something quickly, such as expand the size of a column, you're more likely to write the DDL in SQL*Plus and (maybe) add it to your repository later, rather than go through the steps necessary for this task in the Designer. (Of course you can always reconcile.) And, as others have posted, I say "a lot more" because you can use Designer to generate relatively complete applications using Oracle Developer 2k, Web pages, etc. It also has a business process modeler and other things which strike me more as gimmicks than truly useful modules, but, as they say, your mileage may vary.

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Jack F. Love
Opinions expressed are mine alone, unless you happen to agree