PowerDesigner


SAP PowerDesigner is a collaborative enterprise modelling tool produced by Sybase, currently owned by SAP. It can run either under Microsoft Windows as a native application or in an Eclipse environment through a plugin. It supports model-driven architecture software design, and stores models using a variety of file extensions, such as.bpm,.cdm and.pdm. The internal file structure can be either XML or a compressed binary file format. It can also store models in a database repository.
The PowerDesigner data modeling tool's market share in 2002 was 39%. It's priced from $3,000 to $7,500 USD per developer seat.

Features

PowerDesigner includes support for:
PowerDesigner started life as AMC*Designor in France and S-Designor internationally, which was written by Xiao-Yun Wang of SDP Technologies. The "or" in the product name refers to "Oracle", since initially the product was developed to design Oracle databases, but very quickly evolved to support all major RDBMS in the market. SDP Technologies was a French company that was started in 1983. Powersoft purchased SDP in 1995, and Sybase had purchased Powersoft earlier in 1994. Shortly after the acquisition, the product was renamed to be consistent with the Powersoft brand. Sybase currently owns all rights to PowerDesigner and PowerAMC. In May 2010, SAP announced that it would be acquiring Sybase for $5.8 billion.
The data modeling features of the French and English editions were originally following 2 different methodologies: Merise for PowerAMC and information technology engineering for PowerDesigner. Since version 7, both editions support all methodologies and only differ from their user language. From v16.6 onwards, both editions are called PowerDesigner and are delivered in a single installer.

Version History

PowerDesigner supports the following standards: