Re: What is the differences between Developer/2000 and Designer/2000?

Tony Rothwell <tony_at_santen.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>In article <540coi$kqt_at_newsgate.duke.edu>, Robert Gordon
><rgor_at_nando.net> writes
>>engineering functions. The modeling tools bundled with Designer/2000
>>are absolutely no match in any way, shape or form for products like
>>ERwin, S-Designer, etc. but, at least they are integrated with a
>>shareable (Oracle-based) repository. If you model with ERwin and then
>>model with Designer/2000 (as I have), you'll see what I mean. You can
 

>Hi Robert
 

>Can you give some specific aspects of ERwin's modeling tools that you
>prefer to Designer/2000's (as much detail as possible please)?
 

>This is a genuine request, not a flame!
 

>Thanks for your help.

>--
>Tony Rothwell

I know this probably sounds like a cop out, but many of the things I prefer in ERwin are "look and feel" issues. The graphical User Interface of ERwin is just more ergonomic IMHO. I sat down with ERwin and was doing serious data modeling within an hour. It took me several days to really figure out similar things w D/2000 - like what the cardinality icons meant, how to display primary keys only as opposed to all attributes, toggle between views, or separate models into subject areas and stored displays. And setting up domains and validations were easier to figure out under ERwin. Maybe it's just me, but every feature seemed to be where it should have been in ERwin but I had to search for the same feature with D/2000. Like why doesn't the right mouse button bring up a menu for formatting or changing colors or highlighting individual attributes, etc. And when I tried to delete a dataflow diagram or ER diagram through the repository object administrator it wouldn't allow me to. I had to open the diagrammer to do so. I don't know if this was a design oversight or a "safety" feature - but I don't personally like it. D/2000 reminds me of the old Andersen Foundation product line (Plan/1, Design/1, etc.). Which I won't comment on except to say that I didn't like it and never met anyone who did. Having used a number of modeling tools in my life, I have developed an instinct (albeit a subjective one) for which ones are easy to use and which ones aren't. I truly hope Oracle works on the interface as well as the feature set. Conceptually speaking, I really would like to use Designer/2000. I hope it won't turn out to be just another incarnation of Oracle/CASE.

ERwin does have some shortcomings though. It does not currently support views, synonyms, mappings between tables and entities (data warehousing source/target mapping requisite), and cannot handle incremental designs (i.e. generate ALTER statements - although Logicworks tells me any day now the new release will support ALTER's. And ERwin only supports a 1:1 mapping between entity and table - which is unrealistic. In my opinion (humble again) either Logicworks is going to have to really enhance ERwin functionality, or Oracle will pass them by enhancing usability and by having a credible modeling tool grafted onto a shared Oracle7-based repository.

Neither tool supports some of the new Oracle7 features like bit-map indexes, star-join queries, etc. And despite PR to the contrary, neither of them (nor any other tool I'm aware of) explicitly and significantly supports data warehouse modeling and design yet. Received on Mon Oct 21 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST