Re: ERwin vs. Visio

The ERWin I normally use is reasonably old, 3.5.2 though I have worked with 4.x and found no significant advantages for what I do with it ... generally make pretty pictures to display at meetings.

Daniel Morgan

Paul Tiseo wrote:

> 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.
>
> --
>
> (Any opinions expressed are strictly mine only and not my employer's)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul Tiseo, Intermediate Systems Programmer
> Reply To: 123tiseo.paul_at_123mayo.edu (drop the numbers)
Received on Thu Apr 18 2002 - 23:59:15 CEST