IBM InfoSphere DataStage Reviews

IBM InfoSphere DataStage was mostly used for ETL and data integration purposes, so extract, transfer, and load, including some data quality use cases. My team used the solution to extract data from various sources, do some business transformations, load the data into a target database, or generate files.

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.

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've been working with IBM InfoSphere DataStage for more than seven years.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a stable product and it's been in the market for quite some time, but in its latest version, there's been some instability caused by the new features introduced in the solution. The architecture was changed a lot and that was causing issues and frequent outages that my company had to go back to IBM for troubleshooting. My team didn't face issues in the earlier version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage. It was the latest version that had instability issues.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a very scalable product.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage has a pretty good technical support, but with the new version, particularly the new architecture and the microservice concept, support sometimes takes a bit of time, even for the IBM team to figure out what's wrong, but once that's been figured out, the team comes up with the solution or with a patch.

Setting up IBM InfoSphere DataStage was easy.

How long the deployment takes would depend on certain factors, but it usually takes just two to three hours.

I have no information on the exact pricing for IBM InfoSphere DataStage because the solution is usually procured by the clients my company works with, though the pricing is higher compared to other solutions, so many clients choose to go with a different solution rather than IBM InfoSphere DataStage.

The last version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage which I've worked with was version 11.7.

I work for an IT service company that works with multiple clients on multiple projects, so close to two hundred people use IBM InfoSphere DataStage for various clients.

Per project, on average, three people take care of IBM InfoSphere DataStage deployment, maintenance, and support-related activities.

My advice to people looking into implementing IBM InfoSphere DataStage is that it's a very good product. A lot of similar products have come up nowadays, but this product has a pretty good reputation as it's been in the market for quite a while. I do think other products such as Talend, Informatica PowerCenter, and Informatica Data Quality are better than IBM InfoSphere DataStage.

My rating for IBM InfoSphere DataStage is eight out of ten.

My company has a partnership with IBM.

We use the solution for data warehousing and data migration. 

The solution is one of the best solutions. 

It is very powerful. It's quite agile. 

It works with multiple servers and offers high availability. It can handle very complex architecture. It has good active-passive capabilities. It makes migrations very easy. 

It is stable.

The solution can scale. 

It offers pretty good support services, at least in France.

A lot about the solution could be improved. 

I'd like to be able to do more with the data and metadata, including copy and pasting, et cetera. It has become easier with the cloud, however. 

I'd like to have the ability to customize code. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. I've used it since 2006. I started with version 7.

The product is stable and reliable. I'd rate it eight out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. 

The solution is scalable. I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten. 

We have six or seven developers on the solution. 

I tend to do most of the troubleshooting. I do not need the assistance of technical support as I am quite knowledgeable. That said, my understanding is that support in France is very good. 

I've also used SQL and Talend. I've also used Informatica, Spark, and AWS Glue. I use a variety of solutions for various clients. 

The installation is pretty fast. It doesn't take too long. We did a deployment a few years ago, and it only took maybe two to three days. We updated it to version 11 at that point. The length of time depends on the architecture. It can vary a bit. 

First, we have to install it on the web server. After that, we have to set up the repository with Oracle or DB2. That takes a lot of time. When you are a big organization, it takes a lot of people. There are configurations and prerequisites that have to be considered. 

Only one person is needed to manage the maintenance. 

We handle the installation ourselves. I handle it mostly on my own. 

I have not noted any ROI statistics.

The pricing depends on the setup. However, we paid $100,000 as a one-time cost for an on-premises setup. 

You do have extra costs when using the product on-premises. For example, you need to have servers to host it. 

I used to be a partner with IBM. I have to reset the partnership. 

I would recommend the solution for on-premises setups. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Right now, I'm working for a telecom company. So, we are using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for constructing ETL jobs for them so that they can load data from their various different sources into their warehouse.

The valuable feature of the solution is, I think, its functionality. So, there are a lot of transformations that you can apply by just using a transformer. Also, you don't need to complicate your SQL queries while trying to transform your data. Hence, the transformer is something I like in the solution.

I don't know if it's just a problem with me, but the issue I see is that when we connect to the server from the client, especially when you're going to run a job or something, the whole connection is really slow. 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.

I have been using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for five years. Also, I am using IBM InfoSphere DataStage Version 11.7. My company is a consultant for DataStage.

Most of the time, it is stable. Sometimes there are some issues you don't understand and go away when you have a read-only job. But that is quite rare. Other times, it seems quite stable.

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

In my company, my team is spread across multiple countries, including Pakistan and India.

I haven't contacted IBM's technical support.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. Also, it's a one-time activity. It is better to have a competent person for deployment since newbies cannot do it themselves.

When I started using IBM InfoSphere DataStage, it was already deployed on the server. So I did not have to go through the installation phase.

ROI is something that the client takes care of, and I think they must be keeping track of it and getting a certain result indicating a good ROI. So, that's why they may have continued using it over the years.

Before DataStage, I did not evaluate other options. Our client was already comfortable with DataStage, so that's what we had to use.

I recommend that other people who want to use it go for DataStage on the cloud. The on-prem version of the solution looks and feels old. Also it's time-consuming as well. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

The solution is mainly used for, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, and home loans.

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

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

I would like the solution to have some basic streaming functionality added.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We don't currently have much in our production environment. We are gradually moving into production, so whatever small setup we have is okay for now. I'm taking the overall perspective into account and I think we do have dependencies on the other jobs. This is purely based on the feedback we receive, which sometimes means that we're not able to run our process because there are dependencies, similar to other jobs also. The jobs don't complete on time. We received feedback that there was a problem handling data, which caused jobs to fail and needed to be rerun. This could be product-specific, design-specific, or anything else, but I think there is room for improvement in terms of stability. I would give the solution a seven out of ten.

I think that scalable systems should also have good performance. The scalability of this solution in my opinion may not be on the same level as Informatica Power Exchange Data Integration.

I give the scalability of the solution a seven out of ten. We are facing problems whenever we have huge amounts of data and there are job failures. We need to take care of how to tackle that situation. 

We didn't need to do anything because the customer, with whom we are working on the project, had already set everything up for us. The initial setup was not in our preview.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

We have a separate platform team or support team. In case of any query, it used to be routed to this team, which was internally used to deal with the Data Stage people.

I'm not a technical expert because I haven't been a developer for 12 years. This is what I understand from the feedback I've received. Informatica Power Exchange Data Integration is much better from a scalability perspective, compared to IBM InfoSphere Data Stage. Scalability, user-friendliness, and inclusion of different business rules are all important, but I think Informatica Power Exchange Data Integration gives us one step further on that.

I'm working for an insurance provider. They have applications where they register claims, insurance, et cetera. We get a flat file from the vendor and put those flat files into our Oracle Data Warehouse and report on the data. We publish those reports to our institutional investors, partners, and business users, including banks. 

The performance is good.

It is working fine.

The solution is stable.

It can scale well.

There can be data quality issues sometimes. It might not be the application. It may be a human error or an issue with the users or developers as well. 

The initial setup can be complex. 

I've been using the solution for a year.

The solution is very stable and reliable. We use it in production without issue.

It is scalable and easy to extend. We have had issues with our data pipelines and were able to scale up within a few days. 

There are around 150 users on the solution right now. 

We do have plans to increase the number of users. We can easily increase or decrease as needed. 

I've never used IBM technical support. 

Another product was used previously. We are a financial services organization. We've used Oracle as the financial business suite. With Oracle, there is DB2 in the back end. There are SAP data services used as well, and there's integration between the applications. 

I did not directly set up the solution. 

Right now, we have the product on-premises.

It is an IBM tool, and there are a lot of steps to deploy it. It's not straightforward. You need to have experience. You need to create replication objects, and you need to learn the commands and scripts. It can be quite complex. 

You do need to have some third-party assistance. A consultant needs to assist with the setup. 

The company has a contract with IBM. I'm not sure of the exact pricing. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

I haven't used it too much. I need more time with the solution. 

Whether another user should try it or not depends on the environment. If you already have a lot of Oracle applications, it might make sense. It can do everything any other ETL can do.

I am a consultant. I provide product information for our clients.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a good product.

It is quite useful and powerful.

From a practice point of view, solutions such as IBM InfoSphere DataStage and Oracle Data Integrator are losing ground, whereas open-source solutions are becoming increasingly powerful.

For example, we are currently working hard on several examples, and in a few years, open-source solutions will take the lead in the market. It will be used by large enterprises. 

Clients are looking for open-source solutions more and more.

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

I have more than 22 years of experience with many different products. 

It has been three to four years that we have been using IBM InfoSphere DataStage.

I have no issues with the stability of IBM InfoSphere DataStage.

Clients are quite dependant on support from the vendor. For example, if you want to activate a new feature on the product, you must create a ticket. You have no information on when it will be implemented, and the vendor does not know because they have a stream of tickets that are completed by the priority given to the ticket.

I am a consultant. I have different projects with different platforms. We are constantly going back and forth to different solutions for different projects.

I have had clients who have used Amazon Redshift.

Over the years, my clients have used many different products. For example, they use IBM Landscape and we use IBM InfoSphere.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did not have issues.

Comparable solutions will have common disadvantages, which is the total cost of the project.

It's quite expensive.

From time to time, I evaluate different products for my clients.

We have had different projects with three of four clients. The average term per project has been nine months and one year.

If you are working with an open-source solution or another solution, you can implement some features by yourself. For example, in the case of Amazon, which has Amazon Lambda, you can easily write your code in Python or Java, and it will orchestrate it. You can create your features yourself easily and gives you more abilities to make your solution run quicker, eliminating the dependence from the vendor.

I would rate IBM InfoSphere DataStage an eight out of ten.

The product is primarily used for  intense data transformation; it's part of the risk management, and dataflow, and is sourcing data from the data warehouse on the SAP Sybase platform.

The connectivity with the databases and the speed and flexibility of modeling is excellent. We like the flexibility of modeling.

The solution is stable.

It can scale.

We'd like better integration with source control and error and diagnostic information. The error messaging needs to be improved. 

The solution is a bit complicated. 

I've been using the solution for four years. 

It's stable. it's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We can scale the solution as needed. 

There are about 50 users on the solution right now. 

While technical support may have been used, I have never personally dealt with them.

I've used SSIS as well and find this product to be more difficult to set up.

The initial setup can be challenging. It's harder to set up than, for example, SSIS.

I'm not sure how long it took to set up, as it was already in place when I joined the team. However, I would say it took a week to deploy.

We have five people on hand that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. They are all engineers. 

The initial setup can be handled in-house. 

The licensing we have is permanent. 

I'd recommend the product to others. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. We've been pleased with its capabilities overall. 

The primary use case is for ETL purposes for when we're building data warehouses or data marts. We use it to get the data from different disparate sources, do some ETL on them, and we use DataStage and then load them into the data warehouse, database, or data mart.

This solution used to be on-premises, but they've recently come out with a hybrid offering.

The performance optimization is quite good in DataStage. It provides parallelism and pipelining mechanisms. I have not found those in Informatica or Talend.

As a product, it needs to be more stable. It's a legacy product, so even though it's high-performing, it's not very stable compared to other products like Informatica or Talend. The UI also looks dated.

In the future, I would like to see more integration with cloud technologies. Technical support could be improved.

I've worked with DataStage for about 9 years.

The stability could be better.

It's scalable.

I would rate technical support 6 out of 10.

For the on-prem solution, it was moderately complex. I'm not sure about the hybrid version.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.