Another feature I believe is extremely useful is the “Universal Naming Utility,” which lets you search and replace a string within your model. You can customize the scope of the search as needed.
Figure 15: Universal Naming Utility.
After you’ve entered the required values, ER/Studio lists all occurrences where the replace modification would apply and you can choose the modifications to make one by one or all at once.
Reporting is one of the strengths of the product. You can create reports about virtually anything in your model.
Figure 16: Report Wizard, page 1.
I especially like the HTML format of the reports, which are best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Figure 17: An HTML report generated by the Report Wizard.
Conclusion
To be honest, my first impression of ER/Studio was “Oh, my god! I’ll never get familiar enough with it for a review during a 14-day trial period.” I was wrong. ER/Studio is very easy to use and offers many user-friendly features to help make your entry into the world of data modeling easier.
Many of the more advanced features like the Macro Editor and the Data Dictionary cannot be mentioned in this short review, but you’ll find that ER/Studio grows with your requirements and needs. You’ll hardly find a need for a feature that isn’t there.
There is one thing I would like to see implemented or improved, however, in case I just haven’t found the switch to turn this on. I’d like to see some graphical representation of constraints like CHECK constraints (though I guess this is somehow quite difficult to visualize).
I really like ER/Studio. If you need an entity relationship modeling tool, you should take a close look at ER/Studio.
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