AWS Data Exchange vs. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

AWS Data Exchange fits best for scenarios where you have datasets that you would like to sell and you want to deliver it to anyone who would like to purchase it. It really beats having to set up downloads via your own website or portal. However, it can get complicated to manage if you're trying to deliver a dataset a client has already paid for.

Incentivized

As I mentioned earlier SQL Server Integration Services is suitable if you want to manage data from different applications. It really helps in fetching the data and generating reports. Its automation make it very easy and time efficient. It works well with large database as well. But it doesn't work well with real time data, it will take some time to gather the real time data. I would not recommend using it in a real time/fast-paced environment.

Incentivized

• Simplified data delivery
• Ability to create any amount of data products
• Ability to integrate payment plans with data products
• Tracking data downloads and users
• Integration with other AWS data services

Incentivized

• Standard ETL use cases for daily loads
• Loading incoming data from Vendors which is placed on FTP and adding them to the SQL Warehouse
• Creating outgoing data files and writing them to Vendor FTPs
• Easy Active Directory integration for seamless connections to SQL Server
• CI/CD by hosting the code on visualstudio.com

Incentivized

• Integration with more data sources
• Ability to deliver data to clients without AWS accounts
• Inclusion of direct data downloads in addition to asynchronous methods

Incentivized

• Connection managers for online data sources can be tricky to configure.
• Performance tuning is an art form and trialing different data flow task options can be cumbersome. SSIS can do a better job of providing performance data including historical for monitoring.
• Mapping destination using OLE DB command is difficult as destination columns are unnamed.
• Excel or flat file connections are limited by version and type.

Incentivized

There have been a lot of problems with ADX. First, the entire system is incredibly clunky from beginning to end.First, by AWS's own admission they're missing a lot of "tablestakes functionality" like the ability to see who is coming to your pages, more flexibility to edit and update your listings, the ability to create a storefront or catalog that actually tries to sell your products. All-in-all you're flying completely blind with AWS. In our convos with other sellers we strongly believe very little organic traffic is flowing through the AWS exchange. For the headache, it's not worth the time or the effort. It's very difficult to market or sell your products.We've also had a number of simple UX bugs where they just don't accurately reflect the attributes of your product. For instance for an S3 bucket they had "+metered costs" displayed to one of our buyers in the price. This of course caused a lot of confusion. They also misrepresented the historical revisions that were available in our product sets because of another UX bug. It's difficult to know what other things in the UX are also broken and incongruent.We also did have a purchase, but the seller is completely at their whim at providing you fake emails, fake company names, fake use cases because AWS hasn't thought through simple workflows like "why even have subscription confirmation if I can fake literally everything about a subscription request." So as a result we're now in an endless, timewasting, unhelpful thread with AWS support trying to get payment. They're confused of what to do and we feel completely lost.Lastly, the AWS team has been abysmal in addressing our concerns. Conversations with them result in a laundry list of excuses of why simple functionalities are so hard (including just having accurate documentation). It was a very frustrating and unproductive call. Our objective of our call was to help us see that ADX is a well-resourced and well-visioned product. Ultimately they couldn't clearly articulate who they built the exchange for both on the seller side and the buyer side.Don't waste your time. This is at best a very foggy experiment. Look at other sellers, they have a lot of free pages to try to get attention, but then have smart tactics to divert transactions away from the ADX. Ultimately, smart move. Why give 8-10% of your cut to a product that is basically bare-bones infrastructure.

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

Incentivized

SSIS is a great tool for most ETL needs. It has the 90% (or more) use cases covered and even in many of the use cases where it is not ideal SSIS can be extended via a .NET language to do the job well in a supportable way for almost any performance workload.

Incentivized

SQL Server Integration Services performance is dependent directly upon the resources provided to the system. In our environment, we allocated 6 nodes of 4 CPUs, 64GB each, running in parallel. Unfortunately, we had to ramp-up to such a robust environment to get the performance to where we needed it. Most of the reports are completed in a reasonable timeframe. However, in the case of slow running reports, it is often difficult if not impossible to cancel the report without killing the report instance or stopping the service.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I think SQL Server Integration Services is better suited for on-premises data movement and ADF is more suited for the cloud. Though ADF has more connectors, SQL Server Integration Services is more robust and has better functionality just because it has been around much longer

Incentivized

• Reduced time to publish datasets for sale by more than 80%
• Increased net profit from dataset sales by ~10%
• Reduced data delivery time to clients by 15%

Incentivized

• Without this, we would have to manually update a spreadsheet of our SQL Server inventory
• We would also have poor alerting; if an instance was down we wouldn't know until it was reported by a user
• We only have one other person who uses SQL Server Integration Services , he's the expert. It would fall to me without him and I would not enjoy being responsible for it.

Incentivized