Likelihood to Recommend The choice to use Actian DataConnect really comes down to pricing and the type of integration project you are performing, specifically with the requirements, whether you want the integration to be on-premise or in the cloud, can you install agents on your servers etc. For integration tools it runs head to head with its competitors.
David Byrd Sr Integration Engineer - Dual Certified in Dell Boomi Developer 1 & 2, and Actian DataConnect
Read full review Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.
Read full review Pros Map multiple source and destination tables - what would be done in many steps in SSIS can be done in one or two "maps" in Data Integrator. Platform independent, cloud based, no client software. Conversion of data types, write flat files - this helps us with integrating systems. Fairly straightforward to use if the user has ETL experience. Read full review Ease of use - can be used with no prior experience in a relatively short amount of time. Flexibility - provides multiple means of accomplishing tasks to be able to support virtually any scenario. Performance - performs well with default configurations but allows the user to choose a multitude of options that can enhance performance. Resilient - supports the configuration of error handling to prevent and identify breakages. Complete suite of configurable tools. Read full review Cons Integration Manager needs better scheduling improvements. Like dependencies, and not running a process again if the prior run is still running. New connector development does not seem a priority. David Byrd Sr Integration Engineer - Dual Certified in Dell Boomi Developer 1 & 2, and Actian DataConnect
Read full review SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming. When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant. While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
Read full review Usability SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.
Read full review Performance Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.
Read full review Support Rating The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
Read full review Alternatives Considered Data Integrator was initially a part of a package deal for us with our new Student Information System. It was chosen prior to my arrival at the institution. Since I discovered we have SQL Server licenses, we have decided to use
SSIS instead since I have a background in the MSBI stack and
SSIS appears to be more straightforward (process flow philosophy vs "map" philosophy.)
Read full review I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
Read full review Return on Investment Our customer likes the consistent reliable integrations we have built so we [got] a definite return on investment. Problems are fairly easy to handle and rework. David Byrd Sr Integration Engineer - Dual Certified in Dell Boomi Developer 1 & 2, and Actian DataConnect
Read full review Data integrity across various products allows unify certain processes inside the organization and save funds by reducing human labour factor. Automated data unification allows us plan our inputs better and reduce over-warehousing by overbuying The employee number, responsible for data management was reduced from 4 to 1 person Read full review ScreenShots HCL DataConnect Screenshots