What needs improvement with Talend Open Studio?

There should be a dedicated support team for Talend Open Studio. We do have a support team, but at times it is critical for us to fix certain things within one or two hours. Usually, the support team takes some 12 hours, which is the standard edition of support. If we could have round-the-clock support, we would be able to resolve many issues which we encounter during the development part. The initial setup for Talend Open Studio is a little complex. We need to have a dedicated person who has an understanding of Talend Open Studio as a tool. It takes some level of expertise, so it is not an easy process, but once we have a dedicated associate who is knowledgeable in that particular field, it becomes comparatively easier.

There is a need for mastery in some areas.

Talend is doing a lot of work at the moment, and it's not there yet, but the whole platform could be managed in a SaaS-type environment. You still need to have the Studio running on a virtual desktop or a PC. They will get to be able to do the whole thing inside your browser, so you don't need to install anything locally. It's down the track, and it's the nirvana that we were looking for in Boomi. But the biggest challenge they have is that the platform is so focused on the Studio for all of its development. They'll probably get there, but they have such a mature Studio client that it's a huge amount of work to get all of that functionality into a browser or SaaS platform. That's pretty much the biggest flaw with the Talend environment—being reliant on the Studio, which needed to be on a local machine. The only other thing is that you have to integrate into an API gateway. We're in Azure, so we use Microsoft Azure Gateway. It doesn't come with its own gateway, which is another sort of big plus side that we saw in Boomi. Talend isn't quite there yet with the API gateway. Other than that, it's bloody hard to find something because it just seems to be all good.

The solution should integrate with a version control system in the subscription versions to make it easy to work with and manage the version control. Talend Open Studio is based on the Eclipse platform. Eclipse has a plug-in that you should install to compile it with Open Studio. Then, you will have access to work with version controls like Git and Bitbucket. The solution could include visualization of the data, which is not available in the solution's subscription version.

The solution needs more integrations.

The high price of the solution is an area of concern where improvements are required.

When faced with a challenge, such as the necessity to link up with an unconventional data source like the legacy Cyprus Vision database that wasn't inherently supported by Talend, I had to resort to writing Python code to establish the connection. The administration console could potentially streamline payment management processes.

It is complicated to understand the configuration process for email components.

Talend Open Studio is in Java language, and right now, you can only use the debug functionality in Java. I see that people who know programming languages other than Java currently face difficulties. The aforementioned area can be of concern where improvements can be considered to help non-Java users.

Comparing Talend Open Studio with SSIS, Informatica, or Data Services, I think the overall workspace concept can be improved since these other solutions have workflows and data flows.

I faced a problem with the connection between Oracle and SQL Server due to a port issue.

When the tool has an error, the error-handling is not that user-friendly. It might just be my inexperience with the tool, but I struggle a lot with finding my layers sometimes. I think my biggest problem with the tool is that the errors are very hard to debug. Our special need is geospatial data, so that could be included as part of the tool and not only as an add-on. It's always hard to do add-ons and tools when it's a third party, and every time there's going to be an upgrade, you don't know if it will keep working. It would be great if they were included as part of the main tool, like FME. That would be my main concern about the Talend tool right now.

Open Studio's pipelines could be improved. It's also lagging behind as the market moves toward the cloud and needs to provide better serviceability. In the next release, Open Studio should include cloud storage as an input.

Nothing comes to mind in terms of areas of improvement. Multiple products are there within the product suite. That can be actually trimmed down. Instead of having multiple products, what they can do is they can have a smaller set of products. That would be better. You need a Java virtual machine, version 11. Anything below that is not going to work. Technical support could answer queries a bit faster.

Comparing the plus and minus of other tools and will try and suggest what can be improved in Talend based on how other tools implemented certain features. Both Talend and Pentaho leverage open-source plugins. There are lots of open-source committees that build solutions as per their requirement; Say, for example, someone may have had a need to create a Tableau data extract from a certain database for the purpose of data visualization in Tableau. They may have created a plugin for this purpose and shared it with the market. We can always go into the market and search for a plugin that someone else created (for ex., to generate TDE files) when we have similar needs. Both Talend and Pentaho offer the 3rd party plugins in their market. This plugin market feature automatically extends/improves the tool capability. If somebody needs a particular feature, they can always build one and publish it for the other developers to use. Other than this, maybe if Talend had a few components, it's easier to deploy solutions; job scheduling is one. Currently, the job scheduler is a separate component within Nexus and is accessible over browser. It can be integrated within TOS (Talend Open Studio) so that we dont need to switch between the two. Nexus holds the repository of compiled program code. However, Nexus doesn't have the ability to keep the repository of the source code programs. That can be improved. Currently, Talend has a versioning feature, meaning the previous version can be named as 0.1 or 1.0 and the subsequent minor/major versions can be increased with incremental version numbers, however, it is not that great as a version control repository (such as VSS, CVS, Git, etc). If a Nexus-like tool can be used for maintaining versions of the underlying source code (not just for the compiled code), that would be great. Basically, version control can be improved.

Talend Open Studio has a lot of capabilities, but there is some restriction. For example, if we want to connect to an SAP system, Open Studio cannot do it. We need to go with an enterprise version. Additionally, the monitoring features could improve. In the next release of the solution, there should be some sort of reporting. If you compare Open Studio with the enterprise version, the enterprise is giving us the usage reports, a lot of in-built reports are available. That feature is not available in the open-source, which can be increased. However, that's not a major show stopper or a concern, but it would be nice to have those features.

There is a lot of aspect of Talend Open Studio that should be improved. We need more components to be more efficient. We use a lot of components, such as Salesforce, and it's not easy to use. There's are minor bugs and it's not easy to use some of the features. Talend Open Studio takes a lot of memory to use, we want to be careful because it needs memory.

The security features could be improved.

Talend should improve the log and error handling to better track the errors you find during development. Sometimes it's challenging to see what's causing an issue, and tracking that on Talend is complicated.

In terms of what can be improved, the scheduling is not there in the sister version, while it is there in the cloud one, which is a paid version. If all kinds of scheduling could be available on the Open Studio that we generally use and practice on, that would be great. The scheduling of the data migration is currently not available in the sister version of Talend Open Studio that we are working on. It is available in the advanced version of the Talend. This is the one thing that can be improvised. Overall, I would like to see better scheduling for multiple, simultaneously running processes.

Talent consumes a lot of resources on my PC. Also, the support could be better.

I can't recall any missing features within the solution. Overall, we are happy with it. The pricing could be lower. They should work to make it more affordable. The solution can sometimes be slow from time to time while using the server. It would be ideal if it was more responsive.

In terms of features, it has all the features that I need. However, it consumes a lot of resources. It is using a lot of RAM, and they need to fix the issue related to resource consumption. It currently requires more than 24 gigabytes of RAM, which is a big amount of RAM.

As for improvements or additional features, I would like to know how to use Java in Talend and also how to use Talend in the cloud or in big data. I would prefer to have storage directly in Talend.

While I can't really speak to technical aspects that need improvement, I can say that the marketing of the solution is not the best. They need to really improve how they present the solution to potential clients. The documentation is lacking within the product. They need to get better at all aspects of describing how it works and how to use it. For example, if you see all the other modern products - like Snowflake or Cloudera - and go to their sites, you will have various types of documentation, including data charts and other things you can get readily access. However, if you go to the Talend site, you won't get this kind of marketing material, which is always required. It's especially difficult when you're writing a proposal. You need to have the technical specifications. All of these modern solutions are quite advanced in terms of their documentation. You go to their site, and you will get a lot of brochures, reports, and other items. This gives you a detailed understanding of the solutions, and all of the specifications, and technicalities, and other things. For Talend, unfortunately, there's a lag in that aspect. From a data management or data engineering perspective, they could stabilize their new features more. It would be ideal if they could consider adding prescriptive or predictive models into their components, such as an alternate data IQ.

The overall marketing and documentation of this product need to improve a lot. For example, if you see all the modern products such as Snowflake or Cloud ETL and go to their site, you will have various advanced documentation, brochures, reports and data charts. You can get prepared from all the information available. However, on Talend's site, you will not get this kind of marketing materials, which should be required. It is especially important If you are writing a proposal, you need to have these technical specifications documents. This documentation gives you a detailed understanding of the solution on top of the specification, technical information and other important information. Talend, unfortunately, is lagging on that aspect, they should work on it. In the future, they could improve on stabilizing existing features and adding more prescriptive and predictive models as part of their components.

What I really don't like is the TAC, which is the Talent Administration Console. It's currently slow, old technology. It's obsolete and ugly to use. The studio is great, whereas TAC is on the other side of the spectrum. Actually, in AWS, in many cases, we are ditching the TAC and we are using Amazon-provided services, like Lambda functions, to code the Talend files produced by Talend Studio. The server-side should be completely revamped.

It is not as visually appealing as some of the other tools.

I haven't really had any issues with the solution although it would be helpful if it were a little more intuitive and that it would include a better setup in between versions.

The solution's data management platform needs improvement. I like the data catalog, however, sometimes it requires other components. The solution should offer better integration with other products.

The user interface could be made simpler. If I am comparing to MuleSoft, there are several things that are easier, such as the integration, as well as any connection to the database, or other data source. In the next release, I would like to see the same simplicity for many of the same functionalities.

We need to use a more complete solution that includes data governance, data quality, data lineage, data classification, and data security. At a minimum, they should include some data quality rules and functionality, and perhaps some login features. Technical support and customer service need to be improved. There is no log available.

We don't get continuous replication of the data. This is something that should be improved. Other competitors have it but for this solution continuous replication is lagging.

There is room for improvement in the performance - it gets the job done but it can be a bit slow, but then it is a free product. For now, it does the job that we need and we're quite happy with it.

I do not have so many issues with the product itself but when I do and I contact technical support, the technical support has not always been very good. At times I have had to wait too long to get a solution from them — sometimes even months rather than days. Technical support should definitely be improved. I think the user interface is an advantage in Talend Open Studio because it is really very good. However, while I am working I sometimes notice a bunch of very minor faults or omissions in the functionality. I see them while working and I don't keep a list so I can not go into many details. But there are a lot of very minor glitches and functional inconsistencies that do not affect the results very much, but if they can be fixed it will improve the system and utility. For example, if I make an FTP connection, I can not use a context variable to define parameters. This feature is just not available and it should be. If such minor gaps are fixed, it would be a much better product and quicker and easier to use. One other thing that can be improved is that it would be good to have more information on the internet for users to assist with problem-solving and use. I think that there is a lot of information out there but at the same time, it seems like a lot of the information is not the most relevant to what a user really needs. I would advise people coming to the product as new users to read the documentation thoroughly and as much as possible, but I would also hope that the standard and quality of that documentation will be improved by Talend.

Having additional training materials, such as a video tutorial, would be an improvement. I used the online guide, which is very good but it is quite long. If there were a video and a training syllabus then it would be good.

Inter-version compatibility is a problem, and migration projects between versions are required. The migration between version 5 and 6 was particularly painful for us as numerous components we had used were "end of life" in 5 and not present in 6, because of Java version upgrade issues, I think. We had not re-generated the executable from previous upgrades, so had to put some code through what effectively was a two version upgrade, to ensure we cleared the Java version issue.

There used to be many Youtube channels that offered Talend training, but now there don't seem to be any. The solution should offer more online training resources.

The profiling perspective needs improvement. Instead of using it in the studio, we are using a different tool which is also provided by Talend. It's redundant. They should remove that from studio to make it more lightweight or improve upon its interface. The two things that Talend lacks is an MDM and the CDC. I know Talend has both of them, but both of them are not exactly usable in actual scenarios. I know that Talend has some integrations with other companies for MDM, but I'm not sure what they're doing for CDC. Maybe Talend can work something out regarding the CDC feature. I know the solution has its own CDC, but they're not focused on it as much as people would like them to be. I would like to know what their plans for it are or if they plan to partner with another organization to market it.

The price for Talend Data Integration should be less expensive.

If I compare Open Studion to other solutions, their interface is robust but not so fancy looking. This is an area that could use improvement. I would like to see an updated interface. Open Studio doesn't have features that some of its competitors do like administrative tools.

TAC could be improved.