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Favourite Data Modelling Tools   


  Our Favourite Data Modelling Tools
 
This page presents an analysis using different criteria of price and features.
Here's the original page on Data Modelling Tools.
All these Products offer Forward and Reverse Engineering.
Generally, the Open Source products are free and support UML, but the support assumes that you are ready and willing to do some of the 'heavy lifting'.

PRICE PRODUCT FEATURE UML OPEN SOURCE USP REVIEW
Free Argo UML   Yes Yes Recommended with MySQL  
Free Azzuri Clay   Yes Yes From Japan  
Free DBDesigner4     Yes Designed for MySQL  
Free Dia   Yes Yes    
Free Umbrello   Yes Yes   Review by A Register
 
Under $500 Case Studio 2         5 Star Review by Dan Horne
Under $500 DB Constructor         Quote for Freedownload Center
Under $500 Dezign         Quote from Barry
Under $500 ModelRight         Quote from David McKelvey
Under $500 TOAD       Also offers TOAD for Data Analysts  
 
Over $2,000 ERWin          
Over $2,000 IBM's Data Architect          
Over $2,000 Sybase Power Designer          
 
Over $7,000 ER/Studio   Yes     Quote from Daryl Purcell

Barry writes about Dezign ...
"Dezign is the one I have used on a regular basis for many years creating Data Models on my Web Site.

I like it because it offers forward and reverse engineering for a wide range of RDBMS's.
I also like the style of the Data Models that Dezign produces.
Finally, Dezign provides a Data Generation facility which I have found to be very useful in the past."

Dan Horne writes about Case Studio ...
"I have found Case Studio to be an outstanding tool in its market niche.
It supports a wide variety of databases, although I've only use it with Oracle,
where I have found it to be excellent.

It's a bargain at $299, and with additional licenses costing only $89, it is well
within the budget of most organizations that do not require an enterprise solution.

I've been searching for a data modelling tool for some time, but most are not within
my price range, and are generally aimed at larger companies.
The competitive products I have found are marginally cheaper, but do not support the
fundamental features I need such as the reverse engineering of existing databases.

The only weakness is the documentation, which is included as a help file.
Some topics such as exporting the diagrams to a graphic file are not covered, and there is
no detail on writing templates to enhance and extend the system.

Likewise, Data Flow Diagrams are barely touched on.
Nevertheless, I am very pleased with my purchase.

Case Studio deserves to be much better known than it is.

Regards
Dan Horne"
Daryl Purcell writes about ER/Studio ...
"I find ERStudio an excellent tool for enterprise data modelling.
Its automatic layout capabilities are better than ERWin and its graphics management capabilities
are better than ERWin.  It is also possible to program Visual Basic macros to extract data from
the model, which is much more difficult in ERWin."

I find it incredible that ERWin is the industry standard when ERStudio is so much better;
at least for Enterprise Data Modelling (I never have to model at physical level).
David McKelvey writes about ModelRight ...
"As a pure Database Physical Modelling Tool, nothing else comes close."
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