S-Designor has anyone used it

Neil Carter

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Sep 26, 1996, 3:00:00 AM9/26/96

to

Has anyone used s-designor ? If so any comments you might have would
be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks
Neil Carter

ismail

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Sep 30, 1996, 3:00:00 AM9/30/96

to Neil Carter

I have used s-designor, it is probably the best software i have used so
far.
you can model dbs and so on...but the main interest for me (Tech Supp)
is to
extract models and scripts to port to a different platform S-Designor
does
that beautifully you can reverse engineer a database extract the ddl
and reload on a different platform.
There is also different S-designor (the one i was talking about is data
architect )
there is also S-Desgnor Appmodeler, ProcessAnalyst, & MetaWorks.

/mehdi.
SYBASE TECH SUPP

Bob Gagnon

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Oct 1, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/1/96

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Sybase Tech support responded with a marketing response. I too have
used S-designer. It is OK. Erwin, ER/1 and Select offer alternatives.
I would not say S-designer is the best. Erwin is my favorite, Select
is more suited to Object models. Er/1 is easy to use. It all depends
on your need. ER/1 can be downloaded from embardaco and Erwin from
LogicWorks.

Andy Grove

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Oct 6, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/6/96

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In article <3251A9...@isource.net>, Bob Gagnon
<rsga...@isource.net> writes

>Sybase Tech support responded with a marketing response. I too have
>used S-designer. It is OK. Erwin, ER/1 and Select offer alternatives.
> I would not say S-designer is the best. Erwin is my favorite, Select
>is more suited to Object models. Er/1 is easy to use. It all depends
>on your need. ER/1 can be downloaded from embardaco and Erwin from
>LogicWorks.

I was recently consulting for a software house in the US who were using
Erwin to model their database which was reasonably large (300 tables).
There were numerous problems with the product dealing with databases of
this size. Erwin and ER/1 are limited tools in that they only provide
physical data modelling. Also, based on my experience of Erwin it is all
too easy to screw up the integrity of your data model as Erwin will
allow you to delete columns that are part of a foreign key without
modifying the foreign key definition.

S-Designor is a far superior product which supports coneptual modelling
(i.e. dealing with entities rather than tables).

--
Andy Grove

Turnpike evaluation. For information, see http://www.turnpike.com/

Andy Grove

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Oct 6, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/6/96

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In article <52disa$6...@mapperley.innotts.co.uk>, Neil Carter
<fts...@innotts.co.uk> writes

>Has anyone used s-designor ? If so any comments you might have would
>be greatly appreciated.
>
>Many thanks
>Neil Carter

I have used s-designor on a fairly large project (database consisting of
around 300 tables). S-Designor is a high quality product supporting
conceptual data models as well as physical data models.

I only hit one problem with the product, there was a bug that stopped me
reverse engineering the database directly from the server. I worked
around this by generating a SQL script from the database and used s-
designor to reverse engineer the SQL script instead.

On the whole a great product. Hope this is useful.

P.S. I was running on NT client against Sybase System 10.

--
Andy Grove

Turnpike evaluation. For Turnpike information, mailto:in...@turnpike.com

thes...@gate.net

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Oct 15, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/15/96

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I am currently evaluating S-Designor 5.1 and ERwin 2.6. They are both
good products. Don't compare older versions of ERwin to the current
release as it has come a long way. However, I prefer S-Designor for the
following reasons.

- Easy to use. You don't have to drill down several levels to add a
column, change a datatype, etc. It's all on one window.
- Seperation of logical and physical datamodels. It will generate your
physical from your logical. (resolves many-to-many's for you)
- Does a better job of reverse engineering than ERwin. Less clean-up
needed.
- Allows you to edit the .def files for customization. (i.e. to use
sp_primarykey/sp_foreign key instead of constraints when generating DDL.
Can define naming standards for indices.)
- Easier to layout model and make it readable.

A few areas where ERwin wins out

- Has a read only module (S-Designor does not)
- ERwin has the largest market share (more likely to add features
requested by customers)
- Has bi-directional synchronization between datamodel and database.
(S-Designor does this by archiving the datamodel, not comparing
datamodel to the database)

Hope this helps.