SAP Data Services Reviews

Our primary use is for storing incidents and all of the financial information that accompany them.

We do maintenance on buildings and our customers call if there is a problem. Each time a call comes in we log the incident, solve the problem, and later invoice the customer.

The most valuable feature is the logging capability. We use it for logging incidents.

The interface is not quite user-friendly and is in need of improvement. 

In the next release of this solution, I would like to have a planning tool.

I have been using SAP Data Services for two years.

With respect to stability, we have not had any problems.

We have not had issues with scalability.

We have our own technical support group, so I have not been in contact with SAP for support.

We are currently evaluating ServiceNow to see if it meets our needs and has a better user interface.

This is not a solution I recommend for incident management. SAP works well for the financial side of the business, but for anybody who is researching solutions for incident management, I suggest that they use another product.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Data migration and data quality.

It offers short development time and pre-built processes.

Ease of development.

Big data, real-time connectivity without the need to use SAP Replication Server

Excellent too

Excellent, you build a network of Job Servers to balanced the execution load

Local teams always available, plus direct support from Walldorf if required

I'm using SAP Data Services since it was an OEM product in Cognos in 1998

Data Services itself, none. The must difficult (kind of) ids to setup the databases connectivity for sources and targets.

In-House

Lower time to put applications in Production

The SAP Data Services EE License has all the additional products for enterprise wide data delivery, like Information Steward, Event Stream Processing, etc.

None, because other products cannot connect to SAP generating ABAP code to access pool and cluster tables

SAP ERP and Salesforce.com integration.

We now have a single ETL tool for all data integration.

Technical Support; platform and database version support.

No.

Yes, with some of the SAP extractors.

No.

Fair.

Not good enough.

Yes. We previously used Microsoft SSIS, but found this a poor solution for our environment. It lacked strong integration with SAP or Salesforce and had extremely limited support for web services.

Initial setup was fairly simple.

In-house.

Estimate this saves us 2 headcount.

Only Microsoft.

Friendly interface and online jobs.

It gave us an easy way to collect different data sources into an analytic DB.

3 years.

It is straightforward.

I did it.

It's a good product which does not require deep knowledge of programming and integrates well with SAP othet products.

Data Quality and ETL. The product has fantastic data quality options and matching/consolidation features. The ETL is very powerful and easy to use.

We were able to increase data quality on the back-end. We didn't have great front-end capture. We are also able to add additional data sources very easily.

Error logging is very cryptic. Embedded Data flows are only customizable on either input or output, not both.

5 Years

No

Sometimes with complex data flows. But generally a stable product.

No. We had a very good admin. Scalability requires a lot of product knowledge.

Same as most large companies. Ok.

Ok. We had the benefit of a Platinum consultant on the project so he was able to escalate issues easily.

Wasn't personally involved, but was straightforward for the development environment. Production was more complex.

In-house. We had an expert.

Don't remember exact ROI, but saved many hours in development and maintenance by using the tool.

Informatica. Wasn't as easy to use as Data Services and the data quality was not as robust.

I am Microstrategy BI developer with 6 years experience and with 1 year experience on SAP Data Services.

Out of 5, I would give SAP Data Services technical support a 4.5. The technical support from SAP was quick and technically very clear. The way the issues are being reviewed and the response we receive are great.

The first ETL tool being implemented is SAP Data Services and it was implemented during 2008.

The product was implemented by a third party consulting company. The implementation was good from a technical perspective, but there were few flaws in the business logic which the third party consulting team should have gained from the in-house business analysts.

Since I recently joined a year ago, I am not sure whether any other tool was evaluated along with this ETL tool.

I would advise implementing SAP Data services using a Unix platform rather than a windows platform.

1. Impact and Lineage analysis.
2. Auto Documentation.
3. Recovery of jobs.
4. Text Data Processing.

I've done a migration project (from OWB to BODS) in Singapore. The reason customer opted for BODS over OWB was automated trigger E-mail when job fails and the recovery of the jobs from the point it failed in the last execution. Also, when loading data from flat files, once the data loading from a file is complete BODS is capable enough to call any batch files to move the processed files to another location after completion.

When working with custom functions, many times it fails to execute (from 4.0 onwards) because of the data types mismatch errors. This has to be corrected.

More than 6 Years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

100% as no manual intervention is required once the solution is implemented.

100%.

It was quite straightforward for me as I had experience with other ETL tools and the concepts.

Through vendor team and the level of expertise was satisfactory.

OWB.

The graphical user interface and powerful SQL generation capabilities make the coding of ETL flows very easy and efficient. The ability to easily run processes in parallel or sequentially is also very valuable. Overall the ease of use is Data Services key benefit.

While Data Services performs very well when dealing with relational structures and to a lesser degree with delimited files, there is significant room from improvement with the integration with web services and related data formats (XML, JSON, etc.). We have had to code our own ETL processes in Python or Java to extract data from all but the simplest web services.

Three years.

If you have a need to access non-relational data sources, review the tool’s capabilities for your specific use cases very carefully.