Azure HDInsight vs. Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)

Well suited: A tiny-mid sized company with no immediate plans of growing the volume of their data processing, that can afford long response times from support. Also it helps if you are not prone to put your hands on Linux and Spark configuration. In fact, it can make things go really faster if you also work with the bundle-in Jupyter. And, if you need to perform some diagnostics and / or administrative tasks, that's full of tools to find an understand the Root Cause. Ideal for non experts. Less appropriate: Big Data company, intense on demand cluster creation, mission critical, costs reduction, latest versions of libraries required, sophisticate customizations required.

Incentivized

1.- Scenaries with poor sources of data is not recomended (Very bad ROI). The solution is for medium-big enterprises with a lot of sources of data and users. 2.- Bank and finance enviroment to integrate differente data form trading, Regulatory reports, decisions makers, fraud and financial crimes because in this kind of scenary the quality of data is the base of the business. 3.- Departments of development and test of applications in enterprises because you can design enviroments, out of the production systems, to development and test the new API's or updateds made.

Incentivized

• Data is presented without interfering others (IT or other dept).
• Data is managed properly and is available for retrievable any time.
• Legacy use of CD/DVD and Pendrive are not required.

Incentivized

• Informatica Powercenter is an innovative software that works with ETL-type data integration. Connectivity to almost all the database systems.
• Great documentation and customer support.
• It has a various solution to address data quality issues. data masking, data virtualization. It has various supporting tools or MDM, IDQ, Analyst, BigData which can be used to analyze data and correct it.

Incentivized

• The only problem I have come across is when loading large volumes of data I sometimes get an error message, I assume this means something is corrupt from within. I would love a way for this to be resolved without having to start over.

Incentivized

• There are too many ways to perform the same or similar functions which in turn makes it challenging to trace what a workflow is doing and at which point (ex. sessions can be designed as static or re-usable and the override can occur at the session or workflow, or both which can be counter productive and confusing when troubleshooting).
• The power in structured design is a double edged sword. Simple tasks for a POC can become cumbersome. Ex. if you want to move some data to test a process, you first have to create your sources by importing them which means an ODBC connection or similar will need to be configured, you in turn have to develop your targets and all of the essential building blocks before being able to begin actual development. While I am on sources and targets, I think of a table definition as just that and find it counter intuitive to have to design a table as both a source and target and manage them as different objects. It would be more intuitive to have a table definition and its source/target properties defined by where you drag and drop it in the mapping.
• There are no checkpoints or data viewer type functions without designing an entire mapping and workflow. If you would like to simply run a job up to a point and check the throughput, an entire mapping needs to be completed and you would workaround this by creating a flat file target.

Incentivized

Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.

Azure HDInsight is usable on the top of Azure Data Lake and gives us the benefit of analyzing large scale data workload in Hadoop. Usability and support from Microsoft are outstanding.

Incentivized

Positives; - Multi User Development Environment - Speed of transformation - Seamless integration between other Informatica products. Negatives; - There should be less windows to maintain developers' focus while using. You probably need 2 big monitors when you start development with Informatica Power Center. - Oracle Analytical functions should be natively used. - E-LT support as well as ETL support.

Incentivized

PowerCenter is robust and fast, and it does a great job meeting all the needs, not just the most commercially vocal needs. In the hands of an expert power user, you can accomplish almost anything with your data. It is not for new users or intermittent users-- for that the Cloud version is a better fit. Be prepared for costly connectors (priced differently for each source or destination you are working with), and just be planful of your projects so you are not paying for connectors you no longer need or want

Incentivized

Inexpert, isolated teams... not good for support an excessively complex platform. Lots of weeks or months for a complex problem troubleshoot. Many time lost stuck on MindTree, before the case was finally escalated with Microsoft!

Incentivized

Informatica power center is a leader of the pack of ETL tools and has some great abilities that make it stand out from other ETL tools. It has been a great partner to its clients over a long time so it's definitely dependable. With all the great things about Informatica, it has a bit of tech burden that should be addressed to make it more nimble, reduce the learning curve for new developers, provide better connectivity with visualization tools.

Incentivized

At this time I have not used any other similar products... I am open to it but Azure HDInsight and its components really work well for our organization.

Incentivized

While Talend offers a much more comfortable interface to work with, Informatica's forte is performance. And on that front, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration certainly leaves Talend in the dust. For a more back-end-centric use case, Informatica is certainly the ETL tool of choice. On the other hand, if business users would be using the tool, then Talend would be the preferred tool.

Incentivized

• ROI is of course there, as no legacy software for data presentation.
• No manual intervention for data retrieval.
• Data is available anywhere as requested.

Incentivized

• The data pipeline automation capability of Informatica means that few resources are needed to pre-process the data that ultimately resides in a Data Warehouse. Once a workflow is implemented, manual intervention is not needed.
• PowerCenter did require more resources and time for installation and configuration than was expected/planned for.
• The lack of or minimal support of unstructured data means that newer sources of dynamic/changing data cannot be easily processed/transformed through PowerCenter workflows.

Incentivized