Customer Reviews

Data Modeling with ERwin

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Considering the thousands you'll spend on data modeling tools and the tens of thousands on salaries, you can't go too far wrong by spending...on a book about a data modeling tool.

"Data Modeling with Erwin" is a hybrid between a data modeling text and one of those "MS-Word for Dummies" books which shows all the dialog boxes in an application and explains what they mean. It does a fine job in both explaining data modeling as well as walking through the Erwin's features.

That said, I was hoping for much more "real world" tips and techniques from this book, i.e. more practice to supplement the theory. Specifically, I would have been interested in best practices for use of "subject areas," and "stored displays." Is there a defacto standard on these things? Also, I would have been interested in some simple guidelines for keeping your model (i.e. the main subject area) "clean looking" when your application has 100+ tables and more relationships. Another example: the "Reverse Engineering" section could use some guidelines on importing a model from a database (e.g Oracle) into Erwin for subsequent development. Things you should do, avoid, etc.

Again, this book might be helpful in the long run. I don't know how it measures up with the Erwin documentation. For me, however, I'll need to pick the hive-mind of the newsgroups for more "real world" advice.

p.s. This book also has one too many references such as "Claude Frankenstein, in his book *IE for a New Tomorrow* defines an entity as..." It gets a bit old after a while.

p.p.s This book lacks a 'lay-flat' binding, so it's hard to read on your desktop while you're eating lunch.

I find the book extremely frustrating to use primarily because it does not provide step-by-step directions to anything. E.g., the section "Selecting the Target Server" (p. 140) shows me the "Select Target Server" dialog. BUT HOW DO I GET TO THAT DIALOG? This is typical of the book. The section on the report browser (p. 144) shows me the Report Browser window (Fig 7.6)-but HOW DO I GET TO THAT WINDOW?

While I have to agree with some earlier reviews that criticize the book for not being a complete reference, I found it far more useful than the LogicWorks/Platinum manuals as a guide to getting started and developing an intelligent approach to getting work done using ERwin. Ms. De Angelis has a clear writing style and does not hesitate to tell the reader how she thinks things should be done. She spends a good bit of time in explaining the fundamentals of data modeling, which is appropriate and useful for the book's intended audience. Not expensive, and probably a good investment for someone trying to get up to speed or who has used the product for a while and would like some guidance in how to use it more effectively.

I agree with the concensus reccomendation, this is a primer. Buy this book to get a 10,000 ft view of the data modeling plateu and a short overview of ERwin. It worked perfectly for me as I was a novice to both modeling and the CA tool.

This book is really an extended user manual that does provide more information than the product's own user guide, but there are very few discoveries to be made whilst reading this book. Many sections of the book are simply descriptions of the product's features.

For the beginner it's the best choice, not for the advanced project manager or system analyst.

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