What is Reddit's opinion of erwin Data Modeler?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

My questions:

1: What are the relations between the items? Identifying, not identifying, many-to-many? Solid lines don't convey much.

2: What are your alternate keys?

3: Are item types exclusive sub-types? Why do so many of the sub-types have exactly the same fields?

4: I'm not seeing where you're keeping the address information for each shipment. That's generally an important thing.

Try using something like ERwin to build/draw your data model. It will be much easier to understand your data model if you're using standard notation. Don't be afraid to split things into 3-4 views if it helps things become more clear.

This is what you need to do:

1. Get a piece of paper
2. Write down the entities as you think they should exist
3. Draw and label the relations between the entities
4. Realize you've screwed up and start again

It may seem like I'm being crass, but this is how it's done. When I'm building a data model, I'm either sketching on paper or doodling on a white board.

When you've got something that looks close to finalized, you can download a copy of ERWin Data Modeler Community Edition and create something a little more professional looking.

A late response, but I've been looking into this recently, and what follows is the best I can come up with. Everyone seems to either ignore migrations, assumes it's obvious, or only ever deploys to a single container.

You can look at how Heroku does this as an example. Database migrations are a separate process. Using Ruby on Rails you would first run "heroku run rake db:migrate". If this was successful, you would then deploy your app "git push heroku master".

In the docker world, you need to run the migrations on only one container, perhaps calling a distinct db migration deploy command. Things could become confused if you were to run multiple migrations simultaneous, i.e. migrating on multiple containers.

If you are using a tool like ERWin, you would just run it's migration action before you deploy your code.

Since our deploys are run through CI, my current plan of attack is to create a deploy script that detects if database migrations are available and run that action before performing a regular deploy.

I used the free version of ERwin data modeler.

The symbols are "Crow's Feet" or IDEF1X notation (or at least my 2-whiskey impersonation). This is an insanely useful document.