SSIS Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

Shivani Pandey

Consultant at Veear Analytics pvt limited

Dec 15, 2022

Download

A useful solution, but the stability is a big problem

Pros and Cons

"The data reader is the most valuable feature."

"We have a stability problem because when something works, it works one time. The next time, it doesn't work."

What is our primary use case?

I have used this solution for integrating SQL into life insurance projects.

What is most valuable?

The data reader is the most valuable feature.

What needs improvement?

If something is working, and then it doesn't work after it goes live, that creates a big problem. This solution is a useful tool, but the stability is a problem.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with this solution for eight or nine months.

Buyer's Guide

SSIS

March 2024

Free Report: SSIS Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about SSIS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

768,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have a stability problem because when something works, it works one time. The next time, it doesn't work. We don't know what is causing that problem.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable. In the current use case, we have about 25 users of the solution.

How was the initial setup?

I found the setup comparatively easy. Within a day, anybody can start using it. Two or three people are more than enough for deployment and maintenance.

What other advice do I have?

The solution is working fine and it is useful. The only problem is the stability.

I rate this solution as a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Serdar Erdurak

Information Zone Leader at digitallency

Sep 1, 2022

Download

A stable solution but performance could be better

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable feature of SSIS is that you can take data from other servers which are not MS SQL Server or Oracle."

"Future releases should improve the data lineage, as it currently is not good."

What is our primary use case?

I am an ETL developer working as an information zone leader. We are an outsourcing company to our customers.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of SSIS is that you can take data from other servers which are not MS SQL Server or Oracle.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see SSIS improve the collection of data trail servers and reporting. Future releases should improve the data lineage, as it currently is not good.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using SQL Server Integration Services for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This solution is stable, but the performance is not good. I believe it can be improved. Informatica is better.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not been restricted by this solution.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Prior to using SSIS I used Informatica. I switched because my organization is using SSIS.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of this solution is not complex.

What about the implementation team?

Most of the time we do the implementation in-house, however, we have used third parties in the past.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Our license with SSIS is annual.

What other advice do I have?

If an organization has the money, I recommend they use Informatica.

I would rate SSIS a seven out of 10 overall.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner

Buyer's Guide

SSIS

March 2024

Free Report: SSIS Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about SSIS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

768,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.

RajeshHegde

Assistant Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 25, 2017

Download

In addition to the ETL challenges, it allows us to do DBA activitities, scripting and many other tasks.

Pros and Cons

"In SSIS, the scope is not only to handle ETL challenges, but it will allow us to do so many other tasks, such as DBA activities, scripting, calling any .exe or scripts, etc."

"SSIS can improve in handling different data sources like Salesforce connectivity, Oracle Cloud's connectivity, etc."

How has it helped my organization?

For the full version of the SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS and SSRS will come as additional features for free. Hence, my organization need not spend extra money for other ETL, reporting and analysis tools. This can give very good flexibility.

What is most valuable?

In SSIS, the scope is not only to handle ETL challenges, but it will allow us to do so many other tasks, such as DBA activities, scripting, calling any .exe or scripts, etc.

What needs improvement?

SSIS can improve in handling different data sources like Salesforce connectivity, Oracle Cloud's connectivity, etc. Also, handling of the different data types will be a big challenge here; so expecting improvement in these areas.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Based on the client's requirements, we switched over to this solution.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is straightforward.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at Informatica and DataStage.

What other advice do I have?

Don't worry, go ahead.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:

Brian Dandeneau Business Process and Strategy Specialist Advisor at NTTData

Report as inappropriate

Sep 4, 2018

Thanks for the review and keep them coming.

I like what you put in here for improvements. However, don't hold your breath for Oracle Cloud integration. Most Oracle ETL/ELT tools don't have direct cloud integration yet and its not on the roadmap for a few years.
V/r,
Brian Dandeneau
CEO Applied Governance

it_user91539

Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 20, 2014

SSIS vs. BizTalk - which is best for integration with Dynamics Ax

During the last couple of years, I have integrated data with Dynamics Ax both with SSIS and BizTalk. A common question I'm asked is what is the difference when every thing is possible in SSIS why do we need BizTalk or what does BizTalk provide different from SSIS. So My answer to this question is something like:

Everything that BizTalk provides can be implemented in SSIS. But the major difference is batch processing. Usually SSIS package are used to migrate large set of data or dataset. BizTalk provide the operations to be perform on one message at time or real time processing. Because everything in BizTalk is XML so BizTalk is very slow on large set of data. BizTalk provides large number of adapters, while In SSIS you have to use direct connection by Oldb, or Sql db to communicate with different database and depend on OlDb connections. In BizTalk large number of Adapter provided to communicate which may or may not be depend on OlDB connection. Build in Tracking system (BAM) and its display on BAM portal is also big advantage on SSIS. For this purpose you have to make a custom tracking system in SSIS which require a lot of coding. Third advantage of BizTalk over SSIS is BRE. Business rule engine. BRE provide the condition whose value can be changed and complete follow of BizTalk application. These BRE roles can be used in multiple biztalk application while these functionality can be achieved on config files in SSIS.

In conclusion, when we required less data integration/migration and require complex decision making we used BizTalk. For example we have to implement complex work flow on single record. BizTalk application also used route data, read from one location, transform it and drop on other location. A simple example of this transactional data, when one transaction is occur in one system and its impact or integration will required on other system we will use BizTalk. BizTalk is a rapid development tool as compare to SSIS.

When we have a large sum of data, we require less complexity and requirement of integrated systems are based on Same technology then we have to use SSIS. Usually SSIS is used to migrate or integrate the non-transaction data or step up data. The delay of migration and integration possible or example Batch processing. SSIS is built for ETL process, it is not rapid integration tool.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user173649Database And BI Developer at a tech consulting company

Report as inappropriate

Dec 18, 2014

But I think the cost is a big factor to go for biztalk or ssis

See all 2 comments

Ricardo_Silva

Big Data Architect, Integration Specialist at Groundswell Group Inc

Aug 22, 2019

Download

Easy to implement and supports many connectors, but performance-tuning requires extensive expertise

Pros and Cons

"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."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

Tuning using this solution requires extensive expertise to improve performance.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this solution for fifteen years.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

This solution is included with the MSSQL server package.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

KirillSlivchikov

Owner at 7Spring Consult

Aug 5, 2019

Download

Offers excellent integration and has great simplicity

Pros and Cons

"The simplicity of the solution is great. The solution also offers excellent integration."

"The interface could use improvement, as well as the administrative tools. Jobs fail from time to time for different reasons. It's not a problem with Microsoft, or SSIS itself. The problems are external, but to find the problems and analyze them it takes too much time."

What is most valuable?

The simplicity of the solution is great. The solution also offers excellent integration.

What needs improvement?

The interface could use improvement, as well as the administrative tools. Jobs fail from time to time for different reasons. It's not a problem with Microsoft, or SSIS itself. The problems are external, but to find the problems and analyze them it takes too much time. If SSIS could make some new monitors or new features for finding the reasons for the problems in the processes and analyzing it for how to correct the issues, that would be great.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for over six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Right now we're working with Azure, and it's scalable, but it's expensive to do so. If we had features to scale the software part of the solution, it would be great.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have support not only for SSIS but Microsoft as a whole because we're an official partner of Microsoft in data warehousing and have a partnership agreement with the company. However, support seems to be connected with sales, and if I call with technical problems and ask if they have some feature to solve the problem, months can go by with no results.

They do, however, have a professional community online and in 95% of our incidents, we can find the solution there instead of calling.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple and straightforward.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend the solution. It's always worked for me and it's usually a top choice for my clients.

I would rate this solution at seven or eight out of ten. It's not a perfect solution, but it works well.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.

it_user91536

Architect at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

Feb 20, 2014

SSIS vs Hadoop

On one corner we have Hadoop, a massively distributed JVM-based data processing engine with a Map & Reduce API and a proven track record in handling huge data-sets. On the other corner we have SSIS, a natively non-distributed ETL engine part of the SQL Server family tool-set with .NET code extensibility features and a drag and drop UI (for the most part anyway). Two sweet technologies, probably shouldn’t be compared to each other but we’re doing it anyway, pitted head to head against a data mapping task to the death (or at least to the recycling of my test VMs)… Now FIGHT!

Recently I have been tasked with building a data processing layer tracking social signals with the following characteristics:

Input data is flat files. Although initially the amount of data might not be classified under “Big Data” per-say, but certainly had the potential to grow very quickly. Files were very small JSON format (1 KB average).
Output data is flat files. Delimited file which will be queried through a Hive Warehouse layer.
Data is only Mapped and not Reduced.Which means data is only extracted from the flat files and processed but never aggregated, and in any case SSIS is not capable of reducing (or aggregating) data in a scale-out architecture without building a custom intermediary layer (such as temporarily placing data in a database).
Data Latency into Hive is of Paramount Importance.

Both technologies are capable of iterating through a large number of flat files, extracting information and building an output, and when we take the Reduce operation out of the equation, we level the playing field and now both technologies can be scaled out, albeit Hadoop in a perhaps more friendly manner.

Although these technologies have a wider application and usage that they might be better suited to, in this experiment I was only interested in performance figures on this basic task.

In order to test these technologies against the mapping task, I have built two test machines, one for SSIS with SQL Server to support the SSIS Catalogue database, and another for a simple 3 node Hadoop cluster, the technical specification for each scenario is as follows:

Integration Service (SSIS)	Hadoop
CPU	4 Cores / Node	2 Cores / Node
RAM	8 GB / Node	3 GB / Node
Nodes	1 VM	3 VMs
OS	Windows Server 2012	CentOS
Edition	SQL Server 2012	Cloudera CDH 4

Although the specifications for each test setup is slightly different, which makes the comparison fairly “unscientific”, the over-all processing resources available for each test scenario should be fairly comparable, with the Hadoop cluster gaining a slight edge in terms of over-all CPU cores and RAM. Besides, we are only looking for a really considerable difference in the result to warrant a favouritism of one technology over the other in this business requirement.

I ran two test scenarios:

Scenario 1: 33,000 small (1KB) JSON input files, each file will have about 5 – 10 values to extract against a key (mapping).
Scenario 2: 33 input files (every 1,000 files in scenario 1 is concatenated)

The results of the test were as follows:

Scenario 1 (33,000)	Scenario 2 (33)
SSIS	14.5 (Min)	3.94 (Sec)
Hadoop Cluster	957 (Min)	134 (Sec)

As can be deduced from the results above, 1 SSIS instance showed up to 66X better performance in handling and processing flat files than the same job running in a Hadoop cluster.

Learnings from SSIS vs Hadoop Test

There are a few key learnings that has been gained by doing this experiment:

Hadoop has a terrible start time when operating on a file, the processing engine could take up-to 5 seconds before it could actually start processing the file, were SSIS takes less than 0.2 of a second. Java has never been a very agile language in my opinion.
Hadoop is not intended to handle a large number of small files, instead try combining smaller files into bigger concatenations. Sometimes it is considerably faster to have a pre-processing step that concatenates files into smaller batches.
Although the number of “Reducers” for a Hadoop job could be easily controlled, it is more difficult to control how many “Mappers” available for a job across the cluster, and Hadoop does not always adhere to the user-set number of Mappers.
Although SSIS outperforms Hadoop by an average of 50X on this simple task, Hadoop scales in a much more user-friendly manner, and allows users to “Reduce” or aggregate the data across all nodes for a particular job, a feature that is not supported by the out-of-the-box Integration Service.
Don’t just jump on new technologies, you need to test it and ensure that it is suitable for your particular business requirement, Hadoop is a great distributed processing engine when used in the correct context. It is too easy these days for managers and BI people to band around the term “Hadoop” for everything “Big Data”, from data processing to warehousing, but you need to take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff.
HDInsight (Microsoft’s Hadoop distribution which runs on Windows and Azure) was another technology that we were investigating at the time, although performance was extremely terrible that it was eliminated from the race fairly quickly.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

GaryMData Architect at World Vision

Report as inappropriate

May 5, 2015

Thanks Ibrahim, that's hilarious "Two sweet technologies, probably shouldn’t be compared to each other but we’re doing it anyway" - thanks for doing this comparison! Very nicely written and summarized. Good work.

BIConsule1f7

BI Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Aug 6, 2019

Download

The drag and drop feature makes it an easy to use solution and it has a good user experience

Pros and Cons

"It has a drag and drop feature that makes it easy to use. It has a good user experience because it takes into account your most-used tools and they're lined up nicely so you can just drag and drop without looking too far. It also integrates nicely with Microsoft."

"There were some issues when we tried to connect it to data storage. It was a connection issue."

What is our primary use case?

We use the on-prem version of this solution. Our primary use case of this solution is for integrated data on the SQL server.

What is most valuable?

It has a drag and drop feature that makes it easy to use. It has a good user experience because it takes into account your most-used tools and they're lined up nicely so you can just drag and drop without looking too far. It also integrates nicely with Microsoft.

What needs improvement?

There are a lot of features that could make this solution better.

There were some issues when we tried to connect it to data storage. It was a connection issue. There is also room for improvement in the underlying language.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for three to four months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

From personal experience, I really can't comment on the scalability, but from what I've seen online, and what I heard from other people is that it scales quite nicely.

How are customer service and technical support?

I haven't had to contact technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used an in-house solution based on Oracle APEX.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We used a consultant for the integration.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We chose SSIS because it was a good financial decision. It was the most cost-effective option at the time.

There are many projects for the company that I work for that requires implementation for a client. I started with it because I just wanted to learn about it, and I had the chance to use it because there was an opportunity that opened up to implement it.

What other advice do I have?

If you have data needs and you are a small or medium enterprise this is a good solution. If you are an organization and you're not dealing with terabytes of data, but you still need to analyze data to make that decision, you should go with this solution.

I would rate it a 7.5 out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.