SAP Data Services Reviews

Scalability and easy to use.

There are a lot of version improvements in the years and makes it hard to sync up with older versions of the same tool.

1 Year.

It is very stable and doesn't crash easily.

Nope.

On a Scale of 1-5, I would give them 3.

On a Scale of 1-5, I would give them 3.

It was already setup on the client system. I used it just for ETL purpose.

Pretty Good

Its a very great tool to be used for ETL process. It has support for all the databases and in most cases, it generates SQL by itself which is a big help for beginners.

Lineage analysis where used, export options, custom functions, connectivity to Business Warehouse (BW).

Fast data load to BW PSA, more integration options between different DBs.

Connections to DBs (datastores), unusual behavior of temp. and permanent tables that just get corrupted sometimes and only solution is to recreate them or re-import from data store.

1 year.

Sudden crashing of DS making unsaved changes lost, happens usually when logged in for a long amount of time.

Nope, its good in extending the features in terms of DWH scalability.

Good support is available via consultants.

Previously BW was being used, but is was a closed system , we had new source application which contained information in oracle and SQL DBs, and BW wasn't very good at loading the data in schedules.

Nope, because of its connectivity to BW it was choosen

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.

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.

Data Quality Transforms, Data Cleanse, Platform, Match.

Doing De-Deduplication of data for Data Cleansing is much easier and has been revolutionised with Data Services. Especially used in conjunction with SAP Information Stewards.

It needs a Web-client.

2 years.

Sometimes when re-installing the product, the program corrupts and needs to be completely removed. Its wastes a lot of time.

None

Sometimes when upgrading the product, the program corrupts and needs to be completely removed. Its wastes a lot of time.

It could be better.

Could also be better. There are still a few niggles that need to be sorted out and it seems that SAP are a bit slow on the comeback.

SSIS. I switched because a) my current company specialises in Data Services and b) because DS is the best tool for working with SAP ERP and SAP Hana.

Straight forward.

In-house.

SSIS only.

Prepare well, read the installation guide and make sure you have all the boxes ticked before going ahead and installing.

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.

The easy integration with SAP Systems and the possibility to create a dataflow which is executed directly in the SAP system source.

With the dataflows created in Dataservices, the customer could load and consolidate data from three different offices (USA, Europe and Argentina) using the same dataflows for every company.

We used a different repository for every consultant and it created problems to maintain the final version of each dataflow in every user. I think there should exist a common repository (as well as in BO reporting suite tools) and give the different accesses via authorization roles.

I used it for 10 months.

The biggest problem was the maintenance of difference repositories.

The stability problems were caused by hardware configuration. My doubt is if Dataservice is difficult to configure or there was a lack of knowledge in the Basis team.

No, we didn't. Actually the dataflows constructed were completely scalable.

No, in that project we only used BO Dataservices.

I think it is easy to use. When we started to use it we had never worked with Dataservices and we could adapt to it easily because the main functions are similar to other tools.

The implementation was with a vendor team. Actually I was the project manager of the vendor and the level of expertise in ETL projects was high but it was our first experience with DataServices.

We only had the net margin of the project construction and it was about 15%.

As the person in charge of the consultancy, we didn’t have costs.

Before working with Dataservices I had worked with other solutions, but in this project we had no choice of another tool. Anyway, I think that Dataservices was a good choice because every source was SAP.

From my point of view, Dataservices is a good ETL choice if there are SAP systems in the sources or the targets (it can help to make BW transformations much easier). In general I would say that it is very important to have a good source and destination definition before implementing anything, as well as in any other ETL tool.