Replacing data. If we've put something in a category or a bucket that is no longer named that anymore because we've evolved with the times and we want to rebrand everything, it makes it way easier to do a quick import with the new terms.
Ideal if the company is already a Microsoft shop, so chances are that it is free with SQL Server. Also, good for moving data between on premise systems. Not ideal for moving data to the cloud. No functionality out of the box to work with REST APIs. Stable product but definitely not the future
Extracting Salesforce attachments in original file format! I do not know of a tool that can do this better, or more efficiently! This is a huge benefit to companies that would like to extract attachments from Salesforce for tasks like data migrations.
Cross-object data extract within one file. You can pull data from related objects as long as there is a populated lookup from the object you are extracting, to another object (Child or Parent).
UI is simple and requires very little to no training. Given the acquisition of Mulesoft by Salesforce, I would not be surprised if DataLoader.IO is rolled out as the new global data loading tool for Salesforce.
At the moment, I can't find a way to rename jobs. This would be useful to organize what was previously created hastily by techs in a rush.
A preview of the job, especially upserts, would take a great deal of stress away from some of us (especially those who are not so confident in their ETL practice).
A native vlookup equivalent may be a welcome addition.
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.
It is easy to use and doesn't require a security token, so I enjoy using it. It also doesn't require any download or installation, which is sometimes a blocker to gettingthings done if the company has limits. also, the dataloader.io is easy for other people to pick up, so others can have visibility into the data jobs that have occurred
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
Dataloader definitely skews towards a more technical userbase. Users should be adept at manipulating data in spreadsheets and decipher JSON formatted error messaging. Additionally, there is a good amount of time need to set up the environment to map to the pertinent fields we are trying to adjust. While I would not recommend the typical account manager to use Dataloader, a typical operations manager should have no issue.
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.
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.
The utility itself is very self-explanatory and has enough information to guide you through the process. It has an intuitive experience for those familiar with data loading/exporting utilities. Outside of this, they have a Zendesk help center to log support requests and provide documentation to help guide you troubleshoot any issues that may be occurring.
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.
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
I have used salesforce inspector also for operations like import and export of data from custom objects but it doesn't work well when you have data in huge numbers. Instead of using Salesforce Inspector, one should go for Dataloader.io if the number of records is huge to be dealt with.
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.
HUGE time saving. When we need to clean or review data, we used to have to do it line by line. This can do the work within excel and make cleanup/management an afternoons work as opposed to a week.
Rollback what you did/change/deleted is relatively simple if you remember to back up the data you are manipulating.
