I have been using ERwin for years, and I have to say that as a DBA, this is my favorite DB development tool I have ever used. Without ERwin it would take me weeks to do what I can do with ERwin in 1 day. If you have never seen or used this incredible tool, do yourself a favor and go to www.ca.com and download a copy of the full blown evaluation today. You will not regret it.
gregspicer6000410, 6/10/2008 6:04:41 AM
This application may be useful for small databases or systems run by small companies but its not really designed for use with large systems.
Unfortunately, and for no reason i can fathom ErWIN does not allow you to select which tables or elements of a database you wish to anaylse. With large systems such as ours which have thousands of tables with the same owner it makes the software almost impossible to use. This functionality is present in Microsofts Visio which is, as we know, not a real ERD application, and what this lack of functionality in ErWIN means is that you have to analyse the entire set of tables even if your are only interested in a small subset. With large databases it means it will often crash during some stage of the analysis.
To stop this software crashing all the time i had to double the RAM in my machine despite it being of the spec required by CA. So an upgrade to 2 GB stopped it crashing and actually allowed me to use the sofware.
Unfortunately it still crashes at various stages and the long and convoluted work around offered involves a lot of hand cranking which defeats the point of automating the process and doesn't give the desired output.
This lack of functionality means we've invested thousands in an application that does not work for big systems and we're now spending lots more through the amount of man hours we are having to dedicate to the work-around.
If you run a large database i'd seriously consider another applictaion or at the very least request a demo so you know it will work with your system before you spend any cash.
2 Review(s) have been written.
