We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, and SSIS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration.
"The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, say, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage."
"The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the flow designer functionally. It is the best out of any ETL tool. Additionally, the solution is reliable and trustable in dealing with large data sources anytime. When we're using billions of data transactions, it's smooth."
"Has a good visual tool for data mapping."
"The most valuable features are the metadata repository and the data warehouse application console."
"Once you figure it out, it is a powerful and simple ETL tool. Its stability has been very satisfactory."
"Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool."
"The greatest feature is that it is very easy to have someone come in and jump right in. It is one of the nicest tools in terms of getting a person acquainted quickly."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"It's very simple compared to other products out there."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to use PL/SQL statements inside the data transformations and jobs."
"The solution has a free to use community version."
"I can use Python, which is open-source, and I can run other scripts, including Linux scripts. It's user-friendly for running any object-based language. That's a very important feature because we live in a world of open-source."
"The amount of data that it loads and processes is good."
"The way it has improved our product is by giving our users the ability to do ad hoc reports, which is very important to our users. We can do predictive analysis on trends coming in for contracts, which is what our product does. The product helps users decide which way to go based on the predictive analysis done by Pentaho. Pentaho is not doing predictions, but reporting on the predictions that our product is doing. This is a big part of our product."
"Pentaho Data Integration is quite simple to learn, and there is a lot of information available online."
"Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool things is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of SSIS are that it works with the query language and it can import data from different sources."
"With this solution, there is the potential to expand, so that you can immediately write code onto the SQL server."
"It's saved time using visualization descriptions."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"The reporting on the solution is perfect. I didn't expect to see reporting features, but they are great."
"The most valuable feature of SSIS is its ease of use. It is easier to use than other applications."
"It has the ability to be deployed into the cloud through Data Factory, and run completely as a software as a service in the cloud."
"The solution could have better documentation on basic steps or blocks that specify what to do."
"The initial setup is not straightforward. You need expertise to do it."
"As a connector to big data, it is not well developed. We've had problems connecting Informatica with Hadoop. The functionality to connect Informatica with Hadoop, for me it's not good."
"While Informatica is great for data-integration, it does not have any analytics features. Thus, organizations have to always look for another product for their BI needs."
"There is a need to buy a separate license if one wishes to connect with some kind of SAP system, such as SalesForce."
"I would like to see improvements made to the custom transformations. It should be more open for users that want to write their own code and use cases."
"Informatica are very rigid when it comes to cloud migrations which discourages customers in moving their solution to the cloud."
"We had stability issues, mostly with JVM size."
"The support for the Enterprise Edition is okay, but what they have done in the last three or four years is move more and more things to that edition. The result is that they are breaking the Community Edition. That's what our impression is."
"The performance could be improved. If they could have analytics perform well on large volumes, that would be a big deal for our products."
"It's not very stable, at least not in the case of the community edition. I'm working with the community edition right now and I think perhaps it is because of that it is not very stable, it causes the system to sometimes hang. I'm not sure if this is the case for pair tiers."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2."
"Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up. There was a zone and, under it, another zone, and under that another one, and under that another one. There were a lot of levels and places inside the report, and it was a little bit complicated. You have to search all these different places using a mouse, clicking everywhere... each report is coded in a binary file... You cannot search with a text search tool..."
"In terms of the flexibility to deploy in any environment, such as on-premise or in the cloud, we can do the cloud deployment only through virtual machines. We might also be able to work on different environments through Docker or Kubernetes, but we don't have an Azure app or an AWS app for easy deployment to the cloud. We can only do it through virtual machines, which is a problem, but we can manage it. We also work with Databricks because it works with Spark. We can work with clustered servers, and we can easily do the deployment in the cloud. With a right-click, we can deploy Databricks through the app on AWS or Azure cloud."
"It could be better integrated with programming languages, like Python and R. Right now, if I want to run a Python code on one of my ETLs, it is a bit difficult to do. It would be great if we have some modules where we could code directly in a Python language. We don't really have a way to run Python code natively."
"A change in the metadata source cripples the whole ETL process, requiring each module to be manually reopened."
"The interface could use improvement, as well as the administrative tools. Jobs fail from time to time for different reasons. It's not a problem with Microsoft, or SSIS itself. The problems are external, but to find the problems and analyze them it takes too much time."
"We've had issues in terms of the amount of data that is transferred when we are scheduling."
"There was also not enough instructions from Microsoft in regards to this application or this technology, which can easily be improved upon."
"We're in the process of switching to Informatica, and we need to work out data lineage and data profiling and to improve the quality of our data. SSIS, however, is not that compatible with Informatica. We managed to connect it to Informatica Metadata Manager, but we don't get good lineage, so we have to redo all our ETLs using the Informatica process in order to accept the proper data lineage."
"We'd like more integration capabilities."
"SSIS is stable, but extensive ETL data processing can have some performance issues."
"We purchase an add on called task factory primarily to allow bulk delete, update and upsert capability. I'd like to see this be part of the standard package."
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