You may have seen erwin's recent press release contents announcing DM 9.7 on January 23rd, containing a number of new (to erwin) capabilities. We would like to commend our brethren for following the trail that ER/Studio blazed over 2 years ago, recognizing the importance of NoSQL platforms in particular. NoSQL is now mainstream and integral to the data architecture of organizations in all industry sectors. Thus, we would like to add some perspective on how the IDERA ER/Studio data modeling solution remains at the forefront of innovation in this area.
A number of the NoSQL platform capabilities mentioned in the announcement are enabled through bridges licensed from a 3rd party, which import and/or export metadata from various sources. We also license and bundle the Metawizard bridges from the same 3rd party. However, in some cases import of metadata is not enough, which is why IDERA ER/Studio introduced native round-trip engineering (forward and reverse) support for Hadoop Hive and native MongoDB support in September of 2014. MongoDB in particular is a document store which can contain embedded objects and embedded object arrays, which cannot be accurately represented using traditional relational notation. Therefore, IDERA ER/Studio extended our notation to correctly represent those constructs. In addition to reverse engineering, we also forward engineer JSON for MongoDB.
Additionally IDERA incorporates the MetaWizard import, export, and data lineage bridges in the ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition, providing extensive access not only to numerous platforms and applications, but also the capability to import specifications from ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tools into data lineage models which can be extended and modified further.
Speaking of platforms, ER/Studio continues to provide extensive support for Teradata 12-15.x, including features such as temporal support and JSON datatypes introduced over a year ago.
ER/Studio continues to offer a user-friendly tool with unique features, such as Universal Mappings, nested submodels, and another industry first – Business Data Objects. Check out this assessment by e-Modelers to read more about key differences between ER/Studio and erwin.
In other recent announcements, erwin has acquired both Casewise and Corso to expand their portfolio and add enterprise architecture features. Adding business process modeling back into the portfolio appears to be a reversal in philosophy, since they abandoned their BPwin process modeling tool, and hence, the customers that relied upon it several years ago. Even so, these disparate, and yet overlapping products may form a nice marketing bundle, but true integration will take time to achieve. IDERA ER/Studio has had an enterprise solution for years, with integrated data modeling, business process modeling, glossaries, team collaboration, in a central repository.
The collaborative repository, known as Team Server, incorporates RESTful API's (Application Programming Interfaces) which allows customers build their own extensions, such as integration to enterprise applications.
If you’d like to see ER/Studio for yourself, you can try it for free for 14 days. Learn more about IDERA ER/Studio data modeling on our website.
Our new IDERA ER/Studio release is just around the corner, so stay tuned!