I was with a client for lunch one day and we asked the server "What do you have on tap?"  She was gone quite a long time, but came back and said "Beer."  It turned out she was right.  But her answer was not that helpful. One of the odd parts of every new project I have to deal with is getting everyone to understand that the question "Can you help us with a data model" results in me asking. "What do you mean by data model?" That's right, I have to ask team members what a data...

Just in case you've been head-down into your data models for too long, in the US the Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday. Traditionally this is a day for massive sales and steep discounts to ensure that Americans start their holiday shopping with gusto.  Over the years, Black Friday has been creeping earlier and earlier in the week and now starts on Thursday for some of the most desperate shoppers. These originally were brick and mortar store sales, but these days Black Friday ...

ER/Studio Enterprise Team edition provides the fastest, easiest, and most collaborative way for data management professionals to build and maintain enterprise-scale data models and metadata repositories. Built-in facilities automate routine modeling tasks so users can analyze and optimize database and data warehouse designs faster than ever. Model change management provides the ability to create and track tasks associated with data models in order to enable data architects to ensure their model...

In the webinar, Demystifying Macros with ER/Studio, Embarcadero Software Consultant Stanley Chan demonstrated how macros work in ER/Studio. He showed how to use the built-in macros and also shared some custom macros during the session. If you missed the live presentation, you can watch it on demand. There were a lot of great questions during the session, some of which Stan didn’t have time to answer live. So he has provided responses to several of those for this blog. Q: In the color-coding de...

Sometimes you need to face the inevitable: the tool selected years ago is not the one you need for the future. Have you been struggling with complicated modeling tasks or outdated tools? Are your data models getting too big to handle? We’ve heard from a lot of customers recently who have been frustrated with their old data modeling tools, for multiple reasons such as: Lack of functionality Lack of support Lack of a future roadmap Embarcadero is committed to enabling our users to adapt to...

Karen Lopez 10 Physical Data Modeling Blunders from Karen Lopez One of my favourite presentation themes is talking about gotchas, blunders and mistakes.  Not because I like to focus on the negative, but because there are some wonderful resources out there telling modelers how to model, and so few out there telling us what NOT to do based on lessons learned. In this slide deck, I focus on physical modeling gotchas based on my reviews of hundreds of great data models that just missed the...