SSIS Room for Improvement

Sakiru Dosumu - PeerSpot reviewer
Head, Development Chapter (DevOps) at First Bank of Nigeria Ltd.

Improvement as per customer requirements. 

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Shubham-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Projects at Cognizant

Sometimes, we have issues with SSIS connectors while extracting data from Excel sources. They should improve this particular area for excellent compatibility.

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BobAmy - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Architect - Data warehousing & BI at Molina Healthcare, Inc.

We purchase an add-on called task factory primarily to allow bulk delete, update, and upsert capability. I'd like to see this be part of the standard package.

I believe there are ways to build a model and set variables so that it can be a generic process.

In my next system, I would like to have a generic process that would handle all the logging and processing in a model that can be modified and enhanced as the need for a better process, or different statistics to be logged is discovered.  I'd want this in a way that the model can be changed and all the processes, with their unique parameters, could all be changed with the model upgraded.

I believe they should add some features that help to create the code using a model. This would allow for continuous improvement of the model uses and easy replication of all the different programs that use the model.

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Buyer's Guide
SSIS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SSIS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Rohit Rastogi - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Data Engineer at Capgemini

There are a couple of areas that could be improved. For example, if I created a package and the package would work on specific data, it could work on the performance or speed of the action. If you are working on a very large amount of data, then creating this package and performing some transformations might take some time. Everything just needs to be faster.

I haven't used SSIS for the last year, so I'm not sure about its new releases as of now.

In terms of its performance, it could be better. That could be something that would be easy and welcomed as an upgrade.

I'd like to see more dashboarding to be able to see the data through a graph. It would be great if I could also share the visualization with my clients.

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PALAK SURI - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Eurofins

It is an easy solution but needs some improvement. The creation of the measure in the DAC's model could be improved.

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Krishna_Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Solutions Specialist at Kuwait Oil Company (K.S.C.)

We would like the solution to be expanded so that it is available for other platforms than just Microsoft.

We would also like to see this product improved so that the the tool can handle streaming data, and near real-time data capture.

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Arpita-Mishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Specialist Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

SSIS is very, very, very slow. It hangs a lot of the time. There is a buffer issue and a memory issue.

You need to keep a lot of packages. There's a lot of maintenance. 

The design is not user-friendly. 

They need to include a lot of connectors, and their component should be much faster. The component, transformation component, like lookup datatype conversion, doesn't work well for large amounts of data.  

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Waqar Malik - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst at National University of Sciences and Technology

The product's stability needs improvement.

The high prices attached to the product can be an area of concern where improvements are required.

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Eyal Golombek - PeerSpot reviewer
Database administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 51-200 employees

No big improvements are needed at this time. 

At one point, we did have to purchase an add-on.

Since we are not using it for a whole ETL, or for a data warehouse, maybe I'm missing something.

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Business Intelligence Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

In upgrading SSIS, we encountered challenges fixing SQL Server and performance issues, including problems during a failover in our data warehouse. After resolving these issues and conducting load balancing tests, we proceeded with the SSIS upgrade, anticipating potential complications. 

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Mylsamy T. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate - IT at Himalaya Wellness Company

They can improve the solution in general. That said, I'm using around 30% to 40% of the SQL server. We have a separate team for the database administration site, so they probably have more of an idea of what needs to be improved.

We've had issues in terms of the amount of data that is transferred when we are scheduling. There are a few restrictions that we faced. In terms of the number of records, the limit can be increased. Sometimes what happens is not enough records are getting pulled, so sometimes the data is getting lost. After that, when the next schedule is running next time, the data is coming to our warehouse for data analysis. We need them to increase the limit of the data transfer on the schedule.

The initial setup was a bit difficult. 

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Sakiru Dosumu - PeerSpot reviewer
Head, Development Chapter (DevOps) at First Bank of Nigeria Ltd.

The performance of SSIS could improve when comparing it to Oracle Database.

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Ullas Soman - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Consultant at Coforge Growth Agency

There aren't any improvements that are required for SSIS at the moment.

We'd like better data lake architecture so we can move SSIS to the data lake if necessary. Involving a data lake or data engineering aspects would be useful. While it is there, we need more features included. 

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Syed Fahad Anwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Developer at HHRC

SSIS doesn't have a very good user interface, but if you can work with it, it'll provide you with almost all of the functionality.

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DM
Data Architect at AMP Capital

It's difficult to refactor SSIS. It gets cumbersome to reuse the solution. 

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VS
Senior Associate at PwC Acceleration Centers

SSIS can improve by the minimum code requirements in stored procedures and exporting data is difficult. They could make it easier, it should be as easy as it is to import data.

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Pavel Adam - PeerSpot reviewer
BI specialist at SKODA AUTO a.s.

I would like to see better technical documentation because many times information is missing.

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SR
IT Manager at European University

We'd like them to develop data exploration more. 

The support could be better.

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AS
General Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

In the next release, SSIS should include automated JSON file management.

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LD
IT Project Management /Research & Development Team Leader at Ethiopian Roads Administration

Microsoft should offer an on-premises support warranty for those using that deployment. They seem to be withdrawing from on-premises options. 

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SB
Admin at IEC (Electoral Commission of South Africa)

It would be nice if you could run SSIS on other environments besides Windows.

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TY
Technical Consultant at LinkDev

We have faced some problems, mostly from a different provider with different language handling.

We'd like the solution to increase the types of integrations on offer. We'd like more integration capabilities. 

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MB
Sr. Training Manager with 201-500 employees

One of the problems I ran into was that the database that I had had a status. I couldn't always flip the status, so I didn't know what data I already had. I had to use SSIS to grab a bunch of data and check the database to see if I needed to insert it. It works okay, but as I plan better, I'm trying to weed it out. SSIS is a bit prickly because anytime you go and change something, it tends to break. That's because there is metadata behind the tool.

I have a tool called ZappySys. I need that tool to cut down on the complexity of SSIS. That tool really helps with a quick turnaround. I can do things quickly, and I can do things accurately. I can get better reporting on errors.

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Dhruv Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect (Data and AI) at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are a lot of connectors that are not available right now. Some third-party connectors and adapters are available, but not directly from Microsoft data, which is an issue. And in terms of maturity, it is a good product. But, again, the way the industry uses these ETL tools, SSIS is not preferred because of many factors. Microsoft is no longer promoting the tool itself and is more focused on its cloud framework. That could be one of the reasons, but a smaller company prefers to SSIS because it is usually free with the SQL Server.

There are a lot of things that Microsoft could improve in relation to SSIS. One major problem we faced was when attempting to move some Excel files to our SQL Server. The Excel provider has a limitation that prevents importing more than 255 columns from a particular Excel file to the database. This restriction posed a significant issue for us, and as a workaround, we had to convert the files to CSV format before importing them. While it involved some manual effort, it was not a big deal since it was a one-time task. These are some small areas of improvement. There's one tool, a very famous and popular tool among banking clients, that supports this kind of data load in SSIS. 

Moreover, in the case of a pivot, which is available in your Excel, there are a lot of ways an Excel file can be created, and you can have a favorite kind of data format in Excel. Importing data of that kind into SSIS can be problematic, and it cannot be done easily. It requires writing some sort of custom code. These basic issues need improvements. 

However, I don't think Microsoft would be willing to make any modifications to the existing capabilities provided by the tool. The reason is that there are already many third-party vendors offering similar functionality through their plugins. 

For example, you can install these plugins within your Visual Studio, and they provide an extra set of features integrated into Visual Studio and SSIS. Perhaps that's why Microsoft has stopped actively improving upon certain features. But, again, this introduces an overhead in terms of development cost. To access additional tools or features, I have to purchase them from another vendor and then implement them. 

Moreover, if something is not directly supported by Microsoft and relies on third-party tools, it can become a significant issue, as I'll have to depend on those vendors, which poses another challenge.

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ArturKowalczyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Innovation Leader at Netrix S.A.

Connectivity to databases other than Microsoft. This is the Achilles' heel.

Integration with other vendors' connectivity should be available as well as being able to read and write data to databases or data storage other than with Microsoft.

There is connectivity with other databases, however, this is the most significant issue that has to be addressed.

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YY
Manager, Data & Intelligence Group, Technical at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

I haven't found too many successful scaling options and that's something that could be improved.

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Anil Jha - PeerSpot reviewer
Director D&A at Iris Software Inc.

I would like to see more features in terms of the integration with Azure Data Factory.

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EL
BI Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

It is an out-of-date product, that we shouldn't be using anymore, as it no longer has many positive aspects.

It is an old tool. We make an effort not to use it. It's a legacy tool, that is nearing the end of its useful life. There could be some good things but we try not to get into that.

We have selected to go with another tool. SSIS should not be used whatsoever anymore. There are new versions, that are cloud-based, which are much more improved and much more feature complete.

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MB
Project Lead Performance Engineer & Automation at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

The solution could improve by having quicker release updates.

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BA
Sr. Architect - Data warehousing & BI at Molina Healthcare, Inc.

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.

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Elena Tejadillos - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Officer in Data Science at United Nations

I have had problems in the past with this tool. The debugging could be improved because when it came to solving the errors that I've experienced in the past, I've had to look at the documentation for more information.

The main difficulty that I have had is to match different data types, where there were errors that I could not fix.

I would like to see better integration with the control sources. 

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AN
CEO at Shiraz University

Sometimes when we want to publish to other types of databases it's not easy to publish to those databases. For example, the Jet Database Engine. Before the SSIS supported Jet Database Engine but nowadays it doesn't support the Jet Database Engine. We connect to many databases such as Access database, SparkPros databases and the other types of databases using Jet Database Engines and SSIS now doesn't seem to support it in our databases.

In future releases, it would be helpful to support new SQL databases. It would also be helpful if there was a way to use SQL with other languages like Python or ASP.NET.

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AltanAtabarut - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Consulting, Growth, Analytics at Akinon

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.

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XZ
Integration developer at Blackwoods

It lacked robust cloud integration and sometimes struggled with specific data types from sources.

Another area of improvement is performance. It has always been an issue. 

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Pavan Yogender - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and CEO at Zertain

SSIS should be made a little bit more intuitive and user-friendly because it needs an expert-level person to work on it.

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BillyJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at DataHyv

SSIS is cumbersome despite its drag-and-drop functionality. For example, let's say I have 50 tables with 30 columns. You need to set a data type for each column and table. That's around 1,500 objects. It gets unwieldy adding validation for every column. Previously, SSIS automatically detected the data type, but I think they removed this feature. It would automatically detect if it's an integer, primary key, or foreign key column. You had fewer problems building the model. 

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Vichitra Mohan - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Service Team Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

SSIS sometimes hangs, and there are some problems with servers going down after they've been patched.

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MJ
Senior Manager Software Development at Techlogix

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. 

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IL
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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. 

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MG
Technical Product Owner, Team Lead at ARCA

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.

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SP
Principle Consultant at Keyrus South Africa

In terms of improvements to the solution, I don't think I have that expertise on it to recommend product enhancements right now. I've only used a few parts of it. Based on what I've used so far, I am happy with it.

I come from a coding background and this tool is graphically based. Sometimes I think it's cumbersome to do mapping graphically. If there was a way to provide a simple script, it would be helpful and make it easier to use.

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BD
Business Process and Strategy Specialist Advisor at NTTData

Scalability of SSIS needs some improvement. Seems to get sluggish as soon as we hit a high volume of data.

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MP
Senior Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sometimes we need to connect to AWS to get additional data sources, so we have to install some external LAN and not a regular RDBMS. We need external tools to connect. It would be great if SSIS included these tools. I'd also like some additional features for row indexing and data conversion. 

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IS
Director at Netica d.o.o.

The solution should offer more information online for users of SSIS. There are only a few general data sources available, but it would be helpful if there was more extensive information.

The solution could also use some more intelligent discs for data manipulation, or maybe some artificial intelligence as well. It needs more integration tools, so you can connect to different sources.

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Lucas Dreyer - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at BBD

The synchronous processing needs to be improved. For batch processing, it works fine, but when you start to do real-time processing, I find that this solution is not strong, depending on how you use it. If you use it for short batches, micro batching, that might work, but it is not as good for queuing real-time processing. This solution needs full support for real-time processing.

The solution needs better support for XML and JSON.

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

The solution could improve on integrating with other types of data sources. We had issues with connecting to Oracle, it did not do as good of a job as it did with SQL servers. 

In my experience, more efficiency is needed when it comes to dealing with huge volumes of data. However, this is also dependant on the server capacity.

In an upcoming release, they should update the features to facilitate efficient data transfers. 

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it_user342606 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Lead: Global Markets Data Analytics at Rand Merchant Bank

We're in the process of switching to Informatica, and we need to work out data lineage and data profiling and to improve the quality of our data. SSIS, however, is not that compatible with Informatica. We managed to connect it to Informatica Metadata Manager, but we don't get good lineage, so we have to redo all our ETLs using the Informatica process in order to accept the proper data lineage.

As an example of what I'd like to see in SSIS is something that I think is very effective in Informatica. In Informatica PowerCenter, you define your sources and destinations once and after that, you can simply drag and drop into the designer. It's quite a nice feature. I don't know if SSIS has that feature, but if they don't, if they could allow the setup system configurations in one step and then offer drag and drop functionality, that would be extremely useful.

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VD
student at University of Newcastle

Metadata management. A change in the metadata source cripples the whole ETL process, requiring each module to be manually reopened.

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Edgar Talom - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Support Engineer/ Implementation Analyst /DBA at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Sometimes, there are compatibility issues with some features. From time to time, I also face issues when trying to migrate. If I misconfigure things when I use Snapshot, the migration will fail.It can take a long time to migrate huge amounts of data, so it would be nice if that could be faster. 

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AS
Database Consultant

More coding is needed to make it easier. It needs more development and enhancement. It also needs to offer different integration services for SQL. We had to do a lot fo the implementation ourselves, but more automating of the processes would make things easier.

Data migration needs to be simplified. I've found that it is really difficult to match, especially regarding data types. The old records often have different data types than we have now have in newer databases. Converting or transferring this kind of data is very important, and right now it's very difficult.

There were also not enough instructions from Microsoft in regard to this application or this technology, which can easily be improved upon.

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SA
Data Architect and Modeler at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

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it_user1048011 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Developer at a music company with 501-1,000 employees

The login process needs improvement. At the moment, when you run SSIS and it's logging on SysTD within the server itself, I think that you have the option to do verbose and a couple of others. Sometimes, it is difficult to follow how executions are actually working. They are just one after another with an execution set. If you're running multiple packages at the same time, it's difficult to track which packages are running and to locate those specifically.

Improving the login procedure would make our reporting easier on monitoring our ETL processes.

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it_user102120 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Writing custom components and sharing them across multiple ETL streams is tricky and requires specialistic voodoo knowledge
  • Make the GUI less eye-candy and more responsive; especially the scripting component needs some TLC regarding UI responsiveness
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Celine Meesseman - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Ingenia

The security could be improved, as it is more important in our context.

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Shivani Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Veear Analytics pvt limited

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.

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Serdar Erdurak - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Zone Leader at digitallency

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.

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

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.

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RS
Big Data Architect, Integration Specialist at Groundswell Group Inc

Tuning using this solution requires extensive expertise to improve performance.

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KS
Owner at 7Spring Consult

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.

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

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. 

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Alexander Samuel Larico - PeerSpot reviewer
Teaching Professional at Next Idea Lab

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

I would like to see better integration with Power BI.

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it_user275646 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant with 51-200 employees

-If you want to connect to SAP for example you have to buy add-in from other company and the same applies to many other sources.

-It doesn't have a built-in version control, so you have to get that from other vendors too (so it lacks support for multiple developers).

-Visual studio crashes sometimes.

-Doesn't have good ELT functionality, though ofcourse one can just do SQL.

-Overall there's many small things that could be done to make development faster and the product is not definitely perfect, but one has to compare to offerings of other vendors, which are not 'perfect' from usability and performance standpoint eather.

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it_user4014 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
It is unable to provide separate user account for each user like Data Hub. Actually Microsoft SSIS is more designed to build ETL solutions for enterprise level unlike Data Hub where each user can access the database and have their own sets of databases.Need to improve error logging although it does provide error logs but there is still more room for improvement in this area. Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is one of the most effective ETL tools available in the market.Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is very low cost compared to the market’s leader Informatica (Power Center) and almost offers everything you need to build your ETL solution. View full review »
ST
Software Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see an auto-scheduler feature in the Developer version of this solution.

I would also like to see full integration with our BI because then our full load of data will be available in our organization. They should incorporate an ATL process. 

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it_user1080627 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director Business Intelligence at Xtivia

The UI could use refinement. I would like to see more standard components out of the box, such as SFTP, and data compression components.

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Buyer's Guide
SSIS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SSIS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.