The article aside, I appreciate the discussion here about various data modeling tools. I've been using ERwin for years. Like others, I have been rather unhappy with ERwin. Even so, ERwin does all the important things that I need it to do. Ultimately it saves me more time than it costs and helps me create better databases. I tried Visio a couple years ago and while it came close to doing everything I needed it to do, it did not have all the features that I used in ERwin. (I don't use database comparison features, so I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about basic data modeling and forward engineering.)

That being said, I'm still looking for other data modeling tools that will work better than ERwin, especially ones that are cheaper than ERwin. I'm going to check out the three listed by people here. If someone else out there has an additional suggestion or more to add on the current suggestions, please post it!

While not the intention of the author, thanks for writing an article that got people to talk about something that really interests me!