Services

• PowerDesigner 7.0 from Powersoft
• ER/Win from Platinum (formerly LogicWorks)
• System Architect from Popkin Software
• EasyCase from Evergreen Tools

From this array of tools we have internally standardized on PowerDesigner, which we believe offers the most feature-rich development environment for relational designers.  Our staff are all fully trained in this tool and we can bring our own licensed copies on-site to help get your project team up and running as fast as possible in their early stages without having to wait to procure your own copies.  The key advantages that we can derive from our use of PowerDesigner are :

• Conceptual Modeling - because the tool supports both conceptual and physical modeling we are able to show the business model more clearly in the conceptual models.  This includes support for such non-implementable constructs as many-to-many relationships and sub-typing.  These notations, and the absence of explicit foreign key attributes allow for more concise and understandable models.
• Physical Modeling - the conceptual models described above can be projected onto one or more physical models where many-to-many relationships and sub-types are resolved.
• Target Platforms - for those clients requiring implementation of the same logical schema more that one physical model can be derived from the same conceptual model and then tweaked to allow for DBMS quirks and requirements.  We can provide full customization of the mapping from generic data types defined in the conceptual model to physical storage representations in the physical model(s).
• Repository Reports - we have developed a number of custom reports to run against the underlying design repository, once extracted to a database.  These are much more compact that the native repository reports provided by the tool and support efficient communication of all design information to development team members in a compact and efficient format.  We shall probably be extracting this same information into HTML reports in the near future.

We continue to monitor the CASE tools market to see if other tools that we can usefully incorporate into our development lifecycle have become available.  We are actively ramping up our efforts to move into UML modeling tools as well.