At 10/17/2002 08:39 AM, you wrote:

> > I've had pretty good luck over the past month with PowerDesigner 9.5 from
> > Sybase.
>Isn't it pretty expensive?

You can get the Physical Architect (doesn't do Conceptual models) for
$995. That's a little pricey in my book, but it's definitely cheaper than
ErStudio and I'm pretty sure it's less than Erwin. It's a whole lot
cheaper in the long run than my spending my time updating Visio models <g>.

I've tried a bunch of modeling tools, and I've found PD to match my needs
the most. As I mentioned, it's takes a little tweaking of the db
definition, but once that's done I can do things with it that I don't think
I've seen in other products.

Some of those things are:
o The ability to assign a generator to a column (called a Sequence in PD),
which will cause a before insert trigger to automatically be created for
the table. This trigger will include the common 'if (new.id is NULL) then
new.id = gen_id(<gen name>, 1);'
o The ability to enforce referential integrity via triggers rather than
FK's (necessary when a table has a bunch of status columns referring to
items in small lookup tables to avoid creating a very non-selective index
on that column). I'm pretty sure I've seen this in other products, but the
triggers generated by PD are much more thorough.
o The ability to create a comment on a table/column/trigger/view/etc...,
and have an insert statement automatically created to add this comment to
the appropriate RDB$ table. This was a big one for me, because I use this
feature of IB quite a bit for maintaining the documentation of the database
with the database.

The product does take a little getting used to, and there are definitely
some quirks to it. However, it is still the best tool that I've found for
myself.

Bob M..