[Commentary] PowerDesigner (Sybase) Webinars

"Automatically Document Existing Systems And Develop A Detailed Knowledge Base To Make Reaction To Change Faster, More Predictable And Reliable"

It has been two years now since a couple of Sybase guys walked up to the Servoy booth at Apple's developer conference in San Francisco and checked the product out. Very soon after that introduction -- to the delight of all of us early Servoy adoptors -- Sybase replaced Firebird to become the default database to ship with Servoy. Sybase not only brought a significant speed boost to Servoy, it added some much needed name recognition to Servoy in the early days that validated what we all knew was a great product in a field littered with mediocre to down right horrible products.

Since then, I haven't developed any great love for the Sybase iAnywhere development suite that you can download for free to manage your databases -- at least not SybaseCentral and InteractiveSQL. But not a big deal as there are other tools available that work much better.

After attending the webinar today introducing Sybase's PowerDesigner my generally blah opinion of Sybase tools has been completely turned on end. One word: yougottabekiddingme! The brain child of some developer in the early 80's who built the tool to help keep his projects on track (apparently he is still the product manager -- how cool is that? it shows...), PowerDesigner differentiates itself from the crowd of database design tools by being a one-stop round-trip modeling-auto-engineering tool that gives you a picture of your applications from any perspective that you want. UML, requirements, business process, object oriented, physical data, information liquidity, conceptual -- and stuff I have never heard of. AND, get this -- it ties all the models together. Change a requirement in one model and all your connected models are updated automatically.

Here at Data Mosaic we use a plethora of tools to get done what PowerDesigner does in one product. Each tool we use is impressive in its own right but there is no tying together of the various modeling documentation we have for one project. So I end up with folders full of files that I have to maintain myself -- versions and all. Oh yea, and PowerDesigner comes with a repository to track versioning. (Hot tip: you can access the data in this repository from Servoy directly. My thinking is that you can use this to create your own documentation in a Servoy solution that pulls from live data.)

My recommendation: whine a lot and get them to hold this webinar again. David X at Sybase is extremely articulate and you won't be bored. Unless you are a normal person and your eyes roll to the back of your head at the mere mention of "dual core processor." But I digress. The Servoy event page link to keep your eyes on:

http://www.servoy.com/generic.jsp?mt=492&taxonomy_id=492

Here's some additional links given out at today's webinar:

Videos On The Web
http://www.sybase.com/products/developmentintegration/powerdesigner/videos

PowerDesigner Blueprint Newsletter
http://www.sybase.com/products/developmentintegration/powerdesigner/blueprint

PowerDesigner Public Newsgroup
sybase.public.powerdesigner.general

PowerDesigner is included with the purchase of Servoy Developer Professional:
http://www.servoy.com/generic.jsp?mt=395&taxonomy_id=395

Rarely do I see something that I think is REALLY cool. Let me know what you think of PowerDesigner!