Using something other than EA for database design?

[dana n]

I may be mistaken, but EA seems to be a design tool for programmers first, and a database design/modeling tool second. I haven't used many other CASE tools for data modeling, but EA seems to lack basic functionality like *easily* being able to:

-- Create a view
-- Create a composite unique key

Evidently there is more functionality available using Tagged Values, but it seems a little kludgy to me. Maybe EA is trying to be all things to all people? I'm fairly new to EA, so perhaps I'm not giving it a fair chance.

But! I still wonder. Has anyone here who uses EA for programming design opted to use other purpose-built tools for database design / data modeling? Things like PowerDesigner, Oracle Designer, ER/Studio, etc? If so, what features do these tools have that EA does not?

I am a database designer, not a programmer, but EA is the tool I've been given to work with. Wanting to know if it's "just me" or if EA is lacking some seriously functionality for database design.

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh]

This is not so much an EA issue as it is a UML issue.  One knows, of course, that at some point one has to persist information in some way, but from the perspective of the application that is all something that is hidden by the data access layer and one has no idea whether it is stored in an OO database or a relational one, not to mention whether the relational DB was designed specifically to hold the object model or whether it was a legacy system and the object model somehow had to be cobbled on.

[dana n]

Thanks Thomas. I have read that using UML for database design is a bit of a kludge. On the other hand, UML seems to be the modeling language / methodology of choice for most programmers. And I am all for having a common language.

[Frank Horn]

Unfortunately database modelling with EA has severe shortcomings. You cannot customize the way EA creates the script (while you can customize code generation), and it seems like some things are not supported (I seem to recall something about collation).

The worst shortcoming from my point of view is the way views are handled. Unless I have missed something there, a definiton for a view is simply entered as text (i.e. the select statement), so if you change a table name you'll have to change all your views which use the table by hand. This is why I hardly use the feature at all.