August 2006 - PowerDesigner 12.1 released with enhanced support for Microsoft Visual Studio and SQL Server.January 2006 - PowerDesigner 12.0 released with metadata mappings and reporting features.December 2004 - Version 10.0 (Minerva release).December 2001 - PowerDesigner 9.5 was initially released, with maintenance releases through 2003.1999 - PowerDesigner 7.0 was rewritten to take advantage of newer technologies and to provide an interface more consistent with other Sybase products.1995 - S-Designer becomes PowerDesigner, AMC*Designor becomes PowerAMC.1994 - ProcessAnalyst was added to the suite in 1994.1992 - The first commercial release of S-Designer in the US.1989 - The first commercial release of AMC*Designor (version 2.0) in France.From v16.6 onwards, both editions are called PowerDesigner and are delivered in a single installer.

Since version 7, both editions support all methodologies and only differ from their user language. The data modeling features of the French and English editions were originally following 2 different methodologies: Merise for PowerAMC and information technology engineering (based on Yourdon / DeMarco works) for PowerDesigner. In May 2010, SAP announced that it would be acquiring Sybase for $5.8 billion.

Sybase currently owns all rights to PowerDesigner and PowerAMC (the French version of PowerDesigner). Shortly after the acquisition, the product was renamed to be consistent with the Powersoft brand. Powersoft purchased SDP in 1995, and Sybase had purchased Powersoft earlier in 1994. SDP Technologies was a French company that was started in 1983. 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. PowerDesigner started life as AMC*Designor in France and S-Designor internationally, which was written by Xiao-Yun Wang of SDP Technologies.

XML Modeling supporting XML Schema and DTD standards.

Repository It refers to a repository of models (enterprise, information, data).

Supports Simul8 to add simulation functions to the BPM module to enhance business processes design.

Data Warehouse Modeling ( WarehouseArchitect).

Data modeling (works with most major RDBMS systems).

NET, Hibernate, EJB3, NHibernate, JSF, WinForm (.NET and.

Business Process Modeling ( ProcessAnalyst) supporting BPMN.

Powerdesigner 12 serial