It doesn't have any big data connections. It would be good to have them because most of the systems are moving towards big data. There should also be a user-friendly way to interact with the cloud. 

Its loading process is very slow. It takes a lot of time for around 5 or 6 million records, and we are not able to provide real-time data to the vendors due to this delay. Its performance needs to be improved.

It is also like a legacy system. It is not updated much. In higher versions, they only do small changes. We would like to have new features and new technologies.

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. 

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. 

The product must improve logging. It must also improve the navigation guide. When there is an issue, the product must give us insight into why a particular task failed. The troubleshooting guide is very bad. There is no detailed documentation, and the troubleshooting must be done manually. It is a time-consuming task. We must spend much time finding the root cause of a particular task or execution failure. It is very difficult to find an expert in DataStage.

DataStage is a standalone product, but from what I understand, support for this version will end in 2026. Customers will need to use Cloud Pak for Data.

That's what I heard when we were doing an assessment for one of the biggest banks. They are migrating to Cloud Pak for Data because of the support timeline.

Improvements for DataStage could include better integration with modern data sources like cloud solutions and documents, along with enhancing its capability to handle non-structured data.

So, there are some features that are missing. If I compare DataStage to Talend, Talend allows you to write custom code in Java or use these tools in your applications as well if you are building a job application. But in DataStage, it does not allow you to write custom code for any component.

Moreover, Talend allows you to extract Java code and call it in your APIs or applications, DataStage does not have this feature.

In future releases, DataStage could benefit from the ability to save metadata into a database. So, if the database crashes or you lose the data in the database, you could recover it. Unlike files, which are harder to manage.

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 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.

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

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

The graphical user interface (GUI) feels a lot like the interfaces from the 1980s. Regarding IBM, they initially indicated that version 8.11.7 would be their final release. We require more connectors to establish clear connections to cloud services. Connecting to the cloud is not easy or transparent within the product. Although the product has the potential to connect to the cloud, configuring and setting it up is challenging.

In future releases, connecting to the cloud should be easy and transparent.

The features that could be better starts with the user interface. It has been getting better in the last releases and in the past few years, and I guess that they will continue to make progress on this front. But even with the improvements that they have made, it could be even better now, and really should be. I think it's a little bit difficult to use because of the interface. Being user-friendly is important for any product and they need to make this adjustment.

In addition to improvements in the base user interface, I would say it would be good to incorporate more interface options for cloud-based systems.

The mod options should be simplified. Some options on DataStage aren't working properly.

The solution needs to lower its price.

The template mapping could be easier.

The solution should allow for compression of data.

DataStage is quite expensive. It is too hard to find a consultant using DataStage in Turkey.

I want the tool to continue with the on-prem version, not the cloud one. 

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. 

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. 

High-cost of ownership: They could take a page from open source software, such as Talend.

Working with some of the big data components is good, but I can see improvements are needed, such as native support for Spark and HBase.

It would be great if they can include some basic version of data quality checking features. 

The initial setup could be more straightforward.

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.

The interface needs improvement. The interface in Informatica is easier than in DataStage.

The licensing can be improved. Many companies are moving away from DataStage because it is expensive.

The biggest issue that is unclear is how are they integrating into DevOps when they are binary files.

We would like to see DataStage integrated with DevOps so that a pipeline can be created for auto-deployment. Right now we are all doing it manually.

Its documentation is not up to the mark. While building APIs, we had a lot of problems trying to get around it because it is not very user-friendly. We tried to get hold of API documentation, but the documentation is not very well thought out. It should be more structured and elaborate.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see good reporting on performance and performance-tuning recommendations that can be based on AI. I would also like to see better data profiling information being reported on InfoSphere.

The documentation and in-application help for this solution need to be improved, especially for new features. By comparison, in Talend, there is help available for all of the features.

One of my clients has a problem using this solution with MongoDB.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see the ability to copy and paste schemas. It would be very good because as it is now, you have to save the schema to a repository and then re-load it. It can be done in Talend, but in DataStage, it is not as good.

There could be more customization options for the product.

The solution should be more user-friendly.

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.

The response time from support is slow and needs to be improved.

I really like this tool, but the administration should be on the same client application because a lot of administration features are not on the client-side, and they usually need to have administrative access. It's quite complicated to force IT, teams, to have separate administrative access from the developers. 

The platform also needs more stability. It caches a lot. It crashes on the application servers that the host allows on the platform.

The solution needs better online tools for data, or for sourcing data on the internet. They have InfoSphere exchange but it's not as useful for DataStage. 

The solution is currently lacking virtualization ability. If they were to include it, it could be a good evolution on this framework. I'd like to see an improvement in support and a more customer friendly and knowledgeable support staff.  

The price would be the first thing I would want to change. Reduced cost would allow more customers to choose the product. It's quite expensive in relation to the cost of other similar solutions. I think it would also be helpful if the product was more adaptable to other platforms and vendors. I would also like to see an improvement in support. 

The previous project was based on Microsoft SQL. It moved huge amounts of data from different data sources and DataStage to a middle stage, then moved it to Netezza. This created a bottleneck in the solution. We are trying to streamline it and create ETL processes. These will take data exactly from the data sources and move them to Netezza without using of a middle database. The volume of data is quite detailed. We are talking about records in the tens to hundreds of millions. 

We would be happy to see in next versions the ability to return several parameters from jobs. Now, jobs can return just one parameter. If they could return several parameters, that would be great.

We would be happy if the IBM could give us more tolerance for bad networks or VPN channels, as this happens from time to time.

It would be great if we could use more than one SQL operator in the Source DB connector stage. Currently, in the target DB connection stage, we can use several SQL operators, but in the Source DB connector stage we can use only one. It would be better if we could use several.

Data Vault is become more popular. It would be great if it appeared in the newest versions.

I would like them to have more database procedures.

The product is pretty complex to set up. I think it is quite expensive. So, the set up could be simplified and the price could be brought in line.  

I think that performance monitoring could be improved. I know that my colleagues don't give good monitoring. I'm not sure if it's because of the product or because they don't do it normally, but performance monitoring is an issue. I also believe integration with the cloud is not so clear. It's typically a heavy system that people install on-premise. You can install it in the cloud, but it's not so straightforward. You don't find a lot of information unless you go to the IBM cloud. I think IBM is behind in cloud strategy, we would like to put it in the cloud, but there isn't much information about that. 

There are three things that could improve - the cloud, monitoring and cloud integration. It's a solid product but not a modern one and of course it depends what you're looking for. 

The interface needs improvement. It is really too technical. That is the main problem.

In the next release, they could offer more connectors with the new database, especially cloud databases.

The recovery feature. We had DS repos in a bad condition, but IBM couldn't recover it.

It needs a better scheduling mechanism.