Re: ERwin vs. Visio

[Quoted] In article <3CBF1AB8.BBF50006_at_exesolutions.com>, damorgan_at_exesolutions.com says...
> I have 5.0 Professional on my machine. And I am
> familiar with its capabilities. It isn't ERWin.
> And the differences are profound (perhaps except in
> the MS marketing materials).

        Version 5 is many versions old at this point. Is your ERWin as old or are you comparing apples and oranges?

        I concur with J Quick. I had Visio 2000 and recently moved up to the Visio 2002 EA in the Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect package. (Visio 2002 w/ some additional capabilities/templates.) I have also used very recent versions of ERWin and Embarcadero's ERStudio.

        Visio does do "...reverse engineering, forward engineering, and the ability to write code...". In the context of VSNET, it includes change control and versioning, model merging and submodeling. It exports docs to HTML, although not very detailed. With VBA, you can really script the dickens out of it. Basically, I think most if not all of the commonly-used ERWin features can be had in the Visio package too. Furthermore, Visio can do UML or other sorts of ER modeling without having to purchase another piece of software. It can track triggers and stored procedures.

        Issues I am not too sure about seem the relative richness of datatype mappinga and enforcing naming standards. There is no model explorer really. As to pre-written macros/scripts, ERWin and Embarcadero's product come with a few canned scripts. Visio doesn't.

        OTOH, like J Quick, I am a big fan of the ORM Method for easily creating fully normalized ER diagrams and Visio is about the only thing going for that method.

        It's feature-list is impressive. Definitely worth a look for anyone who lives hours on end in modeling tools.

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(Any opinions expressed are strictly mine only and not my employer's)
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Paul Tiseo, Intermediate Systems Programmer
Reply To: 123tiseo.paul_at_123mayo.edu (drop the numbers)