The API is very sparsely understood by people across the user community." "The Bulk Editor needs improvement. We should be able to put it on the cloud for better collaboration and data models sharing." "I would like to see the reporting capabilities be more dynamic and more inclusive of information. It works pretty well, and the fact that we've been using it for more than a decade shows that it is quite solid." "In terms of new features, it would be great to have a cloud base. Other than that, I don't have much feedback.
Collaboration could have been better from an installation perspective, but it is trivial as compared to what we use it for. We struggled quite a bit to get it up and running.
I would like to be able to produce graphs and additional things right in the tool, instead of having to export the data somewhere else." "In terms of improvements, support could have been better in terms of installation, especially of workgroups. More automated reporting and dashboard views would help because currently you have to push things out to a spreadsheet, or to HTML, and there aren't many other options that I know of.
What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model." "I would like to see improved reporting and, potentially, dashboards built on top of that. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. "Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. The data comes to life to where they understand exactly what they're asking for." They'll give you words on a paper, but once they can actually view it as a picture, it really comes to life. Identifying relationships, non-identifying relationships, and being visually right there to understand the differences are great features.Įrwin is key to being able to visually understand whatever the customer is requesting.
It's too easy when you're using other methods to not have naming consistent standards and column consistent definitions, et cetera." "It's a safeguard for me because I'm always concerned that somebody is free handing it and will forget a key coming from the parent. But it's just got gobs and gobs of stuff that you can implement if you so choose to." "Any tool will do diagramming but I think the ability to put the stuff up in a graphical fashion, then think about it, and keep things consistent is what's valuable about it. It seems to be pretty common that not all the functionality is fully utilized. There's a whole boatload of functionality in this thing and we use maybe 10% of it. There are some notes, naming standards, and other functions that we use as well. So, being able to have the same underlying model but only display portions of it at a time is extremely useful." "The modeling portion of the tool is the most valuable. If you had 14 subject areas, 1,000 entities, and 6,000 columns, you can't quite understand it all at once. We are able to divide the information into subject areas, and we can divide the data landscape into smaller chunks, which makes it easier to understand. Another valuable feature is being able to rearrange the model so that we can display it to users. It increases our productivity and helps in understanding our legacy application." "Being able to point it to a database and then pull the metadata is a valuable feature. If I didn't have Data Modeler it would take hours. I can take existing databases and reverse engineer them and understand their structure within 15 minutes.
We use it for that on a regular basis to make sure that changes haven't been made to the database outside of the modeling process. Pairing that information with a dictionary, which has the definitions of the tables and columns or the entities and attributes, ensures that the users understand what the data is so that they can use it best and most successfully." "The logical model gives developers, as well as the data modelers, an understanding of exactly how each object interacts with the others, whether a one-to-many, many-to-many, many-to-one, etc." "There is absolutely no problem with the stability." "The solution's ability to compare and synchronize data sources with data models is fantastic.
Seeing a picture that shows you how the data relates to each other helps you better understand what the data is and how to use it. "The visual data models for helping to overcome data source complexity and enabling understanding and collaboration around maintenance and usage are excellent.