ER/Studio

ER/Studio is data architecture and database design software developed by Embarcadero Technologies. It works across multiple database platforms and is used by data architects, data modelers, database administrators and business analysts to create and manage database designs, document and reuse data assets.

According to Hoberman,^[1] ER/Studio XE3 contains a number of software development productivity tools including ER/Studio. ER/Studio XE3 is a powerful modeling and architecture solution that combines business, data, and application modeling into a multi-level design environment. Data, process, and software modeling interfaces allow business analysts and data architects to understand, design, and communicate software, data, and cross platform architectures across the organization for improved alignment between business and IT. In addition to ER/Studio, ER/Studio XE3 includes:

• ER/Studio Business Architect. A process modeling tool that enables architects to document business processes. Business Architect enables companies to visualize, understand and refine the relationships between business processes and data as part of their enterprise architecture. Business Architect makes it easy to model how data is incorporated into business process by allowing users to both model and analyze the relationships between business processes and data. With this capability, data architects and business users can now come to a common understanding of the business. A shared repository between Data Architect and Business Architect editions means users can seamlessly model systems conceptually, logically, and physically in a collaborative and integrated environment.
• ER/Studio Repository. A server-side model management system that solves the day-to-day challenges of modeling in a team environment, where model collaboration, versioning, security, and object reuse are vital. The Repository allows multiple users to be extremely productive while collaborating on data and business process modeling projects with real-time concurrent access that allows team members to share and re-use assets across projects. The Repository provides real-time data and business process collaboration for the enterprise. This collaborative working environment allows organizations to maintain compliance with business standards and mandatory regulations, while more effectively leveraging enterprise data as a corporate asset. The Repository also provides support for model version management, designed to allow organizations to easily manage all successive states of models and model metadata.
• ER/Studio Portal. A web-based search and reporting tool used to access and query the Repository for improved understanding of metadata, object whereabouts, and data usage. The self-service Portal can be accessed via any web browser for cross-model and repository-wide data definitions and object searches. It brings enterprise-wide visibility to your reports and enable administrators to generate a model, dictionary, or data lineage business report, which frees up the lead architect’s time. Increased compliance with standards and regulations result because organizations can use the Portal to report and track sensitive data and metadata.
• MetaWizard. Integrates metadata across modeling tools, business intelligence, ETL platforms and industry-standard exchange formats (XMI, XML and XSD). This tool enables ER/Studio to integrate with more than seventy other applications by sharing metadata through an import-export capability.
• ER/Studio Software Architect. An object-oriented modeling tool for application architects to visually analyze and design complex software applications. Software Architect simplifies the design stage of a project by organizing and visualizing the requirements, subsystems, logical and physical elements, and structural and behavioral patterns of intensive software systems. It provides developers with powerful productivity facilities through pre-defined patterns, model audits and metrics for quality assurance, and project report documentation. Software Architect supports popular industry standards like OMG’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0 and Object Constraint Language (OCL), as well as providing XMI import/export options and exports to many other common formats.
• Universal Data Models. Standard and industry data model templates for ER/Studio that reduce the development time of database-related projects by an average of 60 percent, as well as improve the quality of existing and new data models. There are nine standard data models, including Accounting, Orders, and Product, and seven industry data models, including Healthcare and Insurance.

Features

• Logical and physical design support
• XML Schema generation from either the logical or physical models
• Automation and scripting support
• Forward- and reverse- engineering
• Automated database code generation
• Integration of models and metadata
• Collaboration support including sub model management, repository, “where used”
• Web publishing, RTF, MS Office integration
• Integrate model metadata with other platforms such as BI, ETL, and other modeling tools.
• Data lineage documentation
• Dimensional modeling
• Model completion validation
• Automatic foreign key migration
• Capacity planning

Support

• IDEF1X
• Star schema
• Snowflake Schema

See also

• Relational Model
• Denormalization
• Data modeling
• Model-driven architecture
• RDBMS
• XML
• XML Schema
• Data warehouse
• Entity-Relationship model

References

External links

• Sales and support
• Official website
• Infoworld.com article
• Bitpipe.com article
• SQL Server magazine article
• ER Studio Tutorial