ModelRight Professional

This is part of continuing set of reviews / opinion pieces about the state of data modeling tools that began over here.

Background

I was talking to a co-worker who was at LogicWorks before they were purchased by Platinum Technology (who were later purchased by Computer Associates) and he mentioned that there was a new ERD company on the block, ModelRight. It turns out that some the original Logic Works folks put this together and I gave it a whirl. It's UI is a bit different but worth investigating further.


Stability

This ia another product I used frequently over the evaluation period. The small model I tested with (< 50 table) worked great and the application was fast and responsive even after many days of use. 

Price
ModelRight Professional: ~$1,095 ($895 + $199 maint)

ModelRight Professional for MySQL: ~$494 ($295 + $199 maint)


Features
Common Checklist

• Logic Modeling: No 
• Physical Modeling: Yes
• Reverse Engineering: Yes 
• Forward Engineering: Yes
• Compare against files and live databases. 
• Sub Models: Yes

The UI is extremely responsive, not only do you grab things when you are intend to, but all of the properties for the selected item are immediately visible. This is because the properties are not in windows that popup but are in a docked pane. I like this very much but it requires a bit more screen space, which makes working with it on a laptop awkward. After I got used to it this made working with the model unexpectedly more efficient.

Reversing out the DB worked as expected and the submodel management was intuitive. Just drag the entity you want to add to a submodel into the model pane and it was added. Slick, fast and efficient.

The compare and forward engineering created some of the most efficient scripts of all the modeling tools I've used. They actually demonstrated features I didn't know about on MySQL and worked very well. I don't think I had to re-write any of the generated scripts.

Conclusion

If you have a single DB platform, ModelRight is definitely a modeling tool to consider. It is the only one that actually made me more efficient than I expected. The SQL it generated was was excellent and it was rock-solid.