Overview
Go Up to User Guide
ER/Studio Data Architect is an enterprise data modeling platform used to design, understand, and govern data structures across databases, warehouses, and file-based systems. It enables organizations to define data meaning first, then implement physical structures with clarity and consistency.
At the core of ER/Studio Data Architect is a business-driven logical model that acts as a shared semantic foundation. By defining common entities, attributes, and relationships at the logical level, teams can reuse definitions, reduce duplication, and maintain alignment across systems, domains, and projects.
ER/Studio Data Architect supports the full database lifecycle. You can reverse-engineer existing databases, compare and merge models, generate forward engineering scripts, and maintain synchronization through round-trip engineering. This allows teams to analyze impact, control change, and continuously improve data structures over time.
Collaboration and governance are built into the platform. Integrated glossary capabilities and connections to leading data governance tools ensure that business definitions, technical models, and enterprise standards remain aligned within a broader data ecosystem.
ER/Studio Data Architect provides:
- Logical and physical data modeling
- Model-driven database design and deployment
- Round-trip engineering and schema comparison
- Enterprise model management and reuse
- Business glossary integration
- Data lineage documentation
- Data warehouse and dimensional modeling support
- Standards enforcement and design validation
This overview provides a basic introduction to ER/Studio Data Architect, the products in the ER/Studio Data Architect family, and IDERA applications that can further enable data architects.
ER/Studio Family Products
There are several products in the ER/Studio family:
- ER/Studio Data Architect: The core data modeling environment. It enables logical and physical modeling, reverse engineering, forward engineering, schema comparison, and standards validation across a wide range of database platforms. ER/Studio Data Architect is where shared meaning is defined and translated into implementable designs.
- ER/Studio Team Server Core: (Installed with the repository) Provides centralized access to models and metadata across the organization. Team Server Core enables search, browsing, impact analysis, and reporting, making models visible and accessible beyond the modeling team. It acts as the enterprise distribution layer for model intelligence. It also hosts the Business Glossary and provides integrates with Data Governance tools.
- Repository: (Installed with Team Server) A version-controlled model management system that supports collaboration and governance. Modelers connect to the Repository to check models in and out, manage revisions, compare and merge changes, and enforce standards. The Repository ensures that enterprise models remain consistent, auditable, and reusable over time.
- MetaWizard: Integrates metadata across modeling tools, business intelligence, ETL platforms and industry-standard exchange formats (Parquet, Avro, XML). This tool enables ER/Studio Data Architect to integrate with more than seventy other applications by sharing metadata through an import-export capability.
In addition to the products above, IDERA also offers the following complementary applications:
- Business Architect: A business modeling tool for creating a graphical representation of your business from the core concepts that describe the business, to the processes that detail how your business operates. The product allows you to easily model your business processes and how those processes use data. The product's Conceptual Modeling provides an alternative way to outline subject areas and concepts that can then drive the creation of detailed data models.
- ER/Studio Viewer: (Viewer) ER/Studio Viewer provides an interactive environment for accessing ER/Studio Data Architect data models, offering the same sophisticated navigational features of ER/Studio Data Architect to members of the modeling team that want advanced viewing, navigation and printing functionality but do not require the ability to edit the models.
Application Design
The following diagram shows the functional relationship among ER/Studio components and user roles.
