Embarcadero makes data models searchable

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By Alex Handy

August 22, 2008 — When a government agency sought to remove what it thought was an offensive ethnic term from its approximately 60 data models, Embarcadero Technologies' new ER/Studio Enterprise Portal caught its eye. The company on Wednesday released this Web-based portal software for generating reports and scanning through huge data models for specifics.

In the case of the government's data models, the portal allowed developers and DBAs to find exactly which columns' names and descriptions needed to be changed. Previously, said Jason Tiret, Embarcadero’s director of modeling and design solutions, such a task might have been accomplished by pushing a data model into a SQL IDE and writing a long line of SQL code. But ER/Studio Enterprise Portal for the first time brings powerful search and reporting tools to this type of task in the company's popular ER/Studio data model repository.

“It's a Web portal on top of our ER/Studio repository. ER/Studio is our data modeling tool. ER stands for Entity Relationship. You use it to reverse engineer Oracle, MySQL, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server databases. It would build a model for you, and you can put it in the repository. Multiple data modelers can work on these at the same time and put in definitions, or classify things by line of business. The portal is allowing other developers, DBAs and business analysts, to search that metadata,” said Tiret.

ER/Studio, said Tiret, “has been on the market since 1996. Now, based on popular demand, we've come out with this portal to help data architects publish models on the metadata and the models. They can take the portal and put their own reports into that. Anyone can log in and run reports and search the repositories. If a developer is working on a specific table and they see a column name, and they don't know what that means, they can open the portal and ask the definition and see the data type.”

ER/Studio Enterprise Portal is available now in packs of licenses ranging from five users to 50. Five users cost US$6,000, while 50 users cost $25,000.

The new portal also helps to keep reports based on data models up to date, said Tiret. “ER/Studio has a lot of reporting capabilities. You can dump things to an Excel spreadsheet or as HTML. The drawback is that they're static. They come out of the model. Once the model changes, you need to regenerate the reports. The portal really ensures everyone is coming to the single source of the truth.”

In the future, ER/Studio Enterprise Portal may add the ability to search through non-Embarcadero data model repositories, said Tiret. Until then, the company is focusing on tweaking usability and improving search functions.

Related Search Term(s): database management, Embarcadero

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