Azure Functions vs. Matillion vs. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)

They're great to embed logic and code in a medium-small, cloud-native application, but they can become quite limiting for complex, enterprise applications.

Incentivized

Great: Need to query simpler APIs, or utilize well known services such as GSheets etc.? Matillion has got some of the best and easiest to use connectors out there. Not so great: Do you need have a competent CI/CD flow that you will be able to update / compare from Matillion as well as other sources at the same time? Good luck, you will need to be extra careful, as you might have to have a deeper dive into your servers Terminal each time you have a git conflict.

Incentivized

Oracle Data Integrator is well suited in all the situations where you need to integrate data from and to different systems/technologies/environments or to schedule some tasks. I've used it on Oracle Database (Data Warehouses or Data Marts), with great loading and transforming performances to accomplish any kind of relational task. This is true for all Oracle applications (like Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Financial Management, and so on). I've also used it to manage files on different operating systems, to execute procedures in various languages and to read and write data from and to non-Oracle technologies, and I can confirm that its performances have always been very good. It can become less appropriate depending on the expenses that can be afforded by the customer since its license costs are quite high.

Incentivized

• They natively integrate with many triggers from other Azure services, like Blob Storage or Event Grid, which is super handy when creating cloud-native applications on Azure (data wrangling pipelines, business process automation, data ingestion for IoT, ...)
• They natively support many common languages and frameworks, which makes them easily approachable by teams with a diverse background
• They are cheap solutions for low-usage or "seasonal" applications that exhibits a recurring usage/non-usage pattern (batch processing, montly reports, ...)

Incentivized

• The user interface of your data pipelines makes it easier for people who aren’t as techy as data engineers to observe what's going on.
• Customer support is quick, not always as efficient as you would want it to be, but still.
• Nice documentation available.

Incentivized

• Oracle Data Integrator nearly addresses every data issue that one can expect. Oracle Data Integrator is tightly integrated to the Oracle Suite of products. This is one of the major strengths of Oracle Data Integrator. Oracle Data Integrator is part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Suite - which is highly used by various industries. This tool replaced Informatica ETL in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Suite.
• Oracle Data Integrator comes with many pre-written data packages. If one has to load data from Excel to Oracle Database, there is a package that is ready available for them - cutting down lot of effort on writing the code. Similarly, there are packages for Oracle to SQL, SQL to Oracle and all other possible combinations. Developers love this feature.
• Oracle Data Integrator relies highly on the database for processing. This is actually an ELT tool rather than an ETL tool. It first loads all the data into target instance and then transforms it at the expense of database resources. This light footprint makes this tool very special.
• The other major advantage of Oracle Data Integrator, like any other Oracle products, is a readily available developer pool. As all Oracle products are free to download for demo environments, many organizations prefer to play around with a product before purchasing it. Also, Oracle support and community is a big advantage compared to other vendors.

Incentivized

• My biggest complaint is that they promote a development model that tightly couples the infrastructure with the app logic. This can be fine in many scenarios, but it can take some time to build the right abstractions if you want to decouple you application from this deployment model. This is true at least using .NET functions.
• In some points, they "leak" their abstraction and - from what I understood - they're actually based on the App Service/Web App "WebJob SDK" infrastructure. This makes sense, since they also share some legacy behavior from their ancestor.
• For larger projects, their mixing of logic, code and infrastructure can become difficult to manage. In these situations, good App Services or brand new Container Apps could be a better fit.

Incentivized

• Matillion is brilliant at importing data -- it would be amazing to have more ways to export data, from emailed exports to API pushes.
• Any Python that takes more than a few lines of code requires an external server to run it. It would be great to have more integration (perhaps in a connected virtual environment) to easily integrate customized code.
• Troubleshooting server logs requires quite a bit of technical expertise. More human readable detailed error handling would be greatly appreciated.

Incentivized

• ODI does not have an intuitive user interface. It is powerful, but difficult to figure out at first. There is a significant learning curve between usability, proficiency, and mastery of the tool.
• ODI contains some frustrating bugs. It is Java based and has some caching issues, often requiring you to restart the program before you see your code changes stick.
• ODI does not have a strong versioning process. It is not intuitive to keep an up to date repository of versioned code packages. This can create versioning issues between environments if you do not have a strong external code versioning process.

Incentivized

With the current experience of Matillion, we are likely to renew with the current feature option but will also look for improvement in various areas including scalability and dependability. 1. Connectors: It offers various connectors option but isn't full proof which we will be looking forward as we grow. 2. Scalability: As usage increase, we want Matillion system to be more stable.

Incentivized

It is maturing and over time will have a good pool of resources. Each new version has addressed the issues of the previous ones. Its getting better and bigger.

We are able to bring on new resources and teach them how to use Matillion without having to invest a significant amount of time. We prefer looking for resources with any type of ETL skill-set and feel that they can learn Matillion without problem. In addition, the prebuilt objects cover more than 95% of our use cases and we do not have to build much from scratch.

Overall, I've found Matillion to be responsive and considerate. I feel like they value us as a customer even when I know they have customers who spend more on the product than we do. That speaks to a motive higher than money. They want to make a good product and a good experience for their customers. If I have any complaint, it's that support sometimes feels community-oriented. It isn't always immediately clear to me that my support requests are going to a support engineer and not to the community at large. Usually, though, after a bit of conversation, it's clear that Matillion is watching and responding. And responses are generally quick in coming.

Incentivized

We were able to control on access and built various enviroment for implementation

Incentivized

This is the most straightforward and easy-to-implement server less solution. App Service is great, but it's designed for websites, and it cannot scale automatically as easily as Azure Functions. Container Apps is a robust and scalable choice, but they need much more planning, development and general work to implement. Container Instances are the same as Container Apps, but they are extremely more limited in termos of capacity. Kubernetes Service si the classic pod container on Azure, but it requires highly skilled professional, and there are not many scenario where it should be used, especially in smaller teams.

Incentivized

Fivetran offers a managed service and pre-configured schemas/models for data loading, which means much less administrative work for initial setup and ongoing maintenance. But it comes at a much higher price tag. So, knowing where your sweet spot is in the build vs. buy spectrum is essential to deciding which tool fits better. For the transformation part, dbt is purely (SQL-) code-based. So, it is mainly whether your developers prefer a GUI or code-based approach.

Incentivized

I have used Trifacta Google Data Prep quite a bit. We use Google Cloud Platform across our organization. The tools are very comparable in what they offer. I would say Data Prep has a slight edge in usability and a cleaner UI, but both of the tools have comparable toolsets.

Incentivized

We're using Matillion on EC2 instances, and we have about 20 projects for our clients in the same instance. Sometimes, we're struggling to manage schedules for all projects because thread management is not visible, and we can't see the process at the instance level.

Incentivized

• They allowed me to create solutions with low TCO for the customer, which loves the result and the low price, that helped me create solutions for more clients in less time.
• You can save up to 100% of your compute bill, if you stay under a certain tenant conditions.

Incentivized

• Matillion has been the backbone of my company's analytical functionalities for 10+ years, so it has a good ROI.
• The price is ok for what our company built with it, but it starts to be less competitive if the tool is not used at its fullest.

Incentivized

• From a business intelligence perspective, it allows us to provide users with the necessary data and information to make informed decisions.
• Compared with other Oracle products and licensing, I do not think the pricing was unreasonable.
• It is part of a larger install, so for ease of use, we purchased it with other Oracle products.

Incentivized