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

At 03:27 PM 4/2/97 GMT, Roger Snowden wrote: }I certainly can't resist replying to this one. I have been using ERWin at }several shops for the past two years. A fine product, indeed. It does a }good job of physical modelling, schema generation, trigger code generation }and a reasonable job of reverse engineering. You have to practice with it, }though. I have seen a couple of cases where a schema was generated that was }just plain silly. In each case, the designer / user was not particularly }familiar with normalization and simply let the tool make stupid decisions. }For example, a primary key on a child, the concatenation of two columns, A }and B. Then, the tool generated another index on A alone, since it was a }foreign key. The second index is pointless, of course. Stuff like that. }You have to review the generation scripts carefully and be willing to blow }away a schema and start over. It has pretty good support for multiple dbms }products, and I have used it to support Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase and }Access. No sweat on any of them. } }Designer/2000, on the other hand, is magnificent. It is a resource hog, but }I simply didn't care. It needs an Oracle repository. You must have an }instance available with maybe 100 Meg of tablespace. Put the repository in }its own tablespace, to keep it clean. } }I plopped it on a P166 with NT 3.51 and 64 Meg. I put a local copy of }Oracle alongside it and stuck the repository in there. I also built a }repository on a DEC Alpha / Unix server when I understood the product }better and was ready for ongoing development. } }D2k does logical modelling, which ERWin does *not*. ERWin is a physical }modelling tool only. D2k also does reverse engineering and - get this - }allows you to make incremental changes to a database. It will detect the }differences between two schemas and generate a script that will alter one }to match the other. That means you can do ongoing maintenance with the }tool. With ERWin, if you want to add a column to a table, the tool }generates a script to recreate the table. D2k will generate the 'alter' }statements. May not sound like much, but if you need to get control of an }existing environment, or need to understand the differences between a }development and test instance, you have to have D2k. D2k has come a long }way. } }If you are going to use it with a remote repository, 32 Meg should be just }fine. You will need either Win/95 or NT on the workstation. } }It also does process modelling and has some code generation tools for C++ }and VB, etc. I haven't messed with that part of it yet. } }Hope this helps a bit. } }Roger Snowden } Have you, or anyone else, evaluated the SilverRun tools??? How do they compare to ER/Win or D2k ?? Jon ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Jon C. Vemo "Life is like a dogsled team, if you ain't the jvemo@cyberspace.com lead dog the scenery never changes." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---