IBM InfoSphere DataStage pros and cons

The best feature of IBM InfoSphere DataStage for me was that it was very much user-friendly. The solution didn't require that much raw coding because most of its features were drag and drop, plus it had a large number of functionalities.

It works with multiple servers and offers high availability.

The solution's scalability is really good...we are using multi-instance jobs where you can scale them easily.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to incorporate very complex business rules in Data Stage.

The solution is stable.

It is quite useful and powerful.

We like the flexibility of modeling.

The performance optimization is quite good in DataStage. It provides parallelism and pipelining mechanisms

Offers great flexibility.

When we have needed help from the IBM team, they were helpful. Our company is a premium partner so we get fast responses.

What needs improvement in IBM InfoSphere DataStage is its pricing. The pricing for the solution is higher than its competitors, so a lot of the clients my company has worked with prefer other tools over IBM InfoSphere DataStage because of the high price tag. Another area for improvement in the solution stems from a lot of new types of databases, for example, databases in the cloud and big data have become available, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage is working on various connectors for different data sources, but that still isn't up-to-date, meaning that some connectors are missing for modern data sources. The latest version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage also has a complex architecture, so my team faced frequent outages and that should be improved as well.

I'd like to be able to do more with the data and metadata, including copy and pasting, et cetera.

It takes a lot of time to actually trigger your job and then go into the logs and other stuff. So all of this is really time-consuming.

The solution can be a bit more user-friendly, similar to Informatica.

The initial setup can be complex.

It would be useful to provide support for Python, AR, and Java.

The error messaging needs to be improved.

In the future, I would like to see more integration with cloud technologies.

Currently lacking virtualization ability.

Their web interface is good but the on-prem sites are outdated. The solution could also be improved if they could integrate the data pipeline scheduling part of their interface.