SSIS Reviews

We have used SSIS in many ways. Primarily, it has been used for building ETLs for populating data warehouse and staging areas. We have developed a number of data marts that were populated. We build data migration packages, which have been reused a number of times with minimal configurations. Additionally, we build complex data integrations solutions and data hand-offs between different applications. We have even used it for creating and parsing SWIFT messages for data integration purposes. We also used it for email triggers. 

Now SSIS has introduced Big Data and cloud components. Though we haven't used any of these yet but it's really a very good addition to enhance SSIS capabilities.

SSIS is a tool which anybody can learn in no time. When we started the project, the whole team learnt it in one week's time and then were ready to start on project tasks. It gives you control. Recently, we used SSIS for a compliance project where we performed data cleansing and extensive data transformations to prepare data files for use of compliance (Trade Based AML solutions) application.

Script task and Script component for custom tasks: It gives you power to build your own logic if your requirements are not being fulfilled with existing available components. While the big thing is you can build your own components, that is not so straightforward. 

It's visual design interface is good and you can easily understand the flow. 

The debugging capabilities are great, particularly during data flow execution. You can look into the data and see what's going on in the pipeline. It has good logging capabilities as well.

It should have other programming languages supported as well from a scripting perspective. Currently, only C# and VB.NET are supported, which limits it to .NET. It should have Java support as well. 

We couldn't explore big data related components, and this area should be up to the mark, if not already. Certain data quality checks should also be part of it. Currently, this is the biggest area that should be looked into. Data quality is an essential part of the integration process and ETL. Currently, only the data profiling task is there. 

As an update, now SSIS offers big data components as well. 

5+ years.

I've been using it for last 7 years in different projects for different banks. Didn't face any stability issues yet.

Yes. It's very much scalable, but it all depends on how you design your solution. SSIS provides you extensive features and toolkit to handle all sort of data problems.

I also used Oracle Data Integrator as an ETL tool but it all depends on your need and customer preference. SSIS is being easy to use and things can be developed very quickly so I prefer to use SSIS for most of my data related tasks.

Its setup is very easy. You don't need too many components to start building ETL tools. Plus, there are a lot of online learning available for this tool. It can be deployed on any Windows machine with minimal requirements.

If you have SQL Server License then you can use SSIS without any additional cost.

Overall, we remained in a good position and in control while using SSIS. We didn't face any challenges.

We are using it in our company and for our clients. I have experience in working with the whole data cycle, which includes data collection, transformation, and visualization. I have worked with the end-to-end process, and I have handled data integration, analysis, and visualization.

I specialize in Microsoft tools, and I have used SSIS for data integration and Power BI for data visualization. I have also worked with Tableau for data visualization and Talend for data integration.

The most valuable thing is that it is easy to connect with Microsoft tools. In Europe, particularly in France, a lot of companies use Excel, SQL Server, and other Microsoft tools, and it is easier to connect SSIS with Microsoft tools than other products.

It is also easy to learn and user-friendly. Microsoft is also good in terms of technical support. They have built a large community all over the world.

When I compare Talend and SSIS, Talend provides more features. With Talend, we can handle a large volume of data. Talend is usually used to treat a large volume of data, which makes it better than SSIS on the data side. 

Talend also has a very good Talend Management Console to schedule the jobs and do other things. It can also be easily connected to version control tools such as GitHub or SVN. The last time I used SSIS, it was connected through TSS for the Windows Console version. I am not sure it has been improved or not. If it is not improved, Microsoft should improve it. They should change the product to provide another console. 

Microsoft is good in terms of technical support. They provide 24-hour support. They have built a large community all over the world, and one can find easily the answer to an issue or problem by searching on the web.

Its installation wasn't my job. We have a team that specializes in infrastructure, and they install and set up the tool. When I was a student, I used to install it myself, and it wasn't really difficult, but I have not installed it on a professional site or for a company. 

Based on my experience and understanding, Talend comes out to be a little bit expensive as compared to SSIS. The average cost of having Talend with Talend Management Console is around 72K per region, which is much higher than SSIS.

SSIS works very well with Microsoft technologies, and if you have Microsoft technologies, it is not really expensive to have SSIS. If you have SQL Server, SSIS is free.

I would rate SSIS a six out of ten. I prefer Talend over SSIS.

We are a software development company and implement solutions like SQL Server SSIS for our clients. We do not use this product ourselves in the company but have experience with it because our client asked for it.

Our clients use it to transform data and generate reports. The use cases are generally simple, and not advanced or complex.

The interface is very user-friendly.

It runs a little bit slowly, although this may be because of our laptops.

I would like to see better integration with Power BI.

The stability is okay. It is easy to support.

There are approximately 10 users. At this time, there are no plans to increase usage.

I have not used technical support. Instead, I read blogs and the support that is available online.

The initial setup is easy, and we did not find it complex.

Our in-house team was responsible for deployment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to ingest data to a data lake that is built on SQL Server.

SSIS seems easy to use, is freely available for programmers to learn on their own, and has a lot of resources on the web for any trouble you get into.

The most valuable features of this solution are the fast insert and fuzzy logic matching.

This may be done, but upgrades to new versions required re-implementing each package.  This is worse for us because we have about one thousand SSIS packages. Hopefully they are now allowing backwards compatibility.

Generic processes should be used instead of custom code for each table.

Our primary use for this solution is to move data between points and applications.

This is a flexible tool to use and comes with the MSSQL server package.

This solution is easy to implement, has a wide variety of connectors, has support for Visual Basic, and supports the C language.

Tuning using this solution requires extensive expertise to improve performance.

This solution is included with the MSSQL server package.

We use this solution for extracting data from various databases and saving it in our data warehouse.

We use the on-premise deployment model.

My team is facing problems regarding the database connectors, which are not available. The MySQL connectors need to be purchased from outside vendors. They should provide connections for more SQL databases, free of charge.

The performance of this solution is not as good as other tools in the market. Compared to the same job is running in a different tool, it will take longer using SSIS.

This is a stable solution.

This solution is scalable.

The number of people I have using this solution depends on the size of the project. Normally, I need three to five ETL developers. Sometimes, if the project is big enough, then I will need more.

I have not contacted Microsoft Technical Support for this solution, although we have sometimes accessed the internet to research problems that we face.

In my previous company, I was leading a team who were working with Informatica. Here, they stick to Microsoft technologies and are unwilling to change.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. In a few hours, everything was up and running.

The decision to use this particular solution includes many factors. Some companies do not want to purchase a license for another product because this one comes included with the database.

SSIS worked well for small or medium-sized Projects. For larger projects with huge data, I believe that you should search for another solution as you will need to do manual fine tuning. Additionally, some components such as SCD will show unexpected errors with huge data.

 As Microsoft is very slow in providing updates and enhancements to SSIS, I see that the future for Integration projects in Saudi Arabia goes towards other vendors products such as  Informatica powercenter, IBM DataStage, and Oracle ODI. 

Compared to other Integration tools, I would rate it a six out of ten.

It's too early to say how it has improved my organization, as we've just begun using the solution. First, we need to create the appropriate role before we see organizational improvements. We're just in the discovery phase of the tool.

I couldn't point out a specific feature above all others, but I can say the solution is very useful to us. It's well designed and quite straightforward. There isn't much of a learning curve involved. It's a well-documented solution. 

It's at a very early stage in terms of adopting the tool, so I can't speak to if there are areas for improvement just yet.

Video training would be a helpful addition, however.

The stability of the solution is impressive.

The scalability of SSIS is very good. Right now, only I am using the solution, but we plan to increase usage in the future.

I haven't required any technical support, so I'm not in a position to judge it.

The setup is straightforward. It's very easy to install.

We did the implementation ourselves.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We are just beginning development with this solution, so we're currently starting with the on-premises version.

So far, I haven't been disappointed by the tool. I have not explored the dashboard tuning feature yet, so I don't know if there are things we can do, like building our own matrixes or choosing deployment preferences, but I hope that will be the case.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I'm using the solution primarily for e-memory and e-database calculation, mostly data blending (ETL) and massive table joining, etc. I also use it for data preparation and modeling.

With this solution, there is the potential to expand so that you can immediately write code onto the SQL server. Auto-parallelization is also critical for us. It decides automatically how many parallel sessions you have to run to get your query handled. You don't need to take care of any code, which is ideal. It's also highly scalable.  

The solution should work on the GPU, graphical processing unit. There should also be a piping integration available.

The design of the dashboard isn't great, visually, but the solution works, so this isn't so important to me.

SSIS's competitor, Autonomous Database by Oracle, offers you, depending on the performance of the server, new hardware, should you update your software. It advises you on how to optimize your system. It's AI and works as an artificial database manager. Microsoft doesn't have anything like this yet, but it would be nice if they did.

The stability of the solution is perfect.

The solution is very scalable. We have approximately 25-30 users for the on-premises version, and our cloud version has around 5,000 users.

We don't ask for much from technical support. We utilize community information, and source answers via the internet or online user information. I do find that communicating with Oracle is much better.

We previously used Oracle as an integration tool, but it's much more expensive than Microsoft.

The initial setup was easy.

We had a consultant that assisted us with the implementation.

I use the private cloud as well as the on-premises version of the solution.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. I would rate it higher if the solution offered full automation AI for database managing, setup and management, and scaling of the solution.