HCL Actian Data Platform vs. SAS Data Management vs. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

This is a tool geared for smaller to mid-sized business that has disparate sources of data from different platforms in varying incarnations. It’s a great ETL tool to solve the problems a scenario like that causes, but you can also achieve that with good BI Tools like Qlik Sense. So be careful that you really need an ETL tool, as opposed to an end-use tool with a built-in ETL component. If you are going ELT and have a lot of data an not a lot of corporate resources, this is a better option than Microsoft or Informatica

Incentivized

When data is in a system that needs a complex transformation to be usable for an average user. Such tasks as data residing in systems that have very different connection speeds. It can be integrated and used together after passing through the SAS Data Integration Studio removing timing issues from the users' worries. A part that is perhaps less appropriate is getting users who are not familiar with the source data to set up the load processes.

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

• Quick response for queries involving multi-million rows
• Low cost

Incentivized

• SAS/Access is great for manipulating large and complex databases.
• SAS/Access makes it easy to format reports and graphics from your data.
• Data Management and data storage using the Hadoop environment in SAS/Access allows for rapid analysis and simple programming language for all your data needs.

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

• As I said before, more training or greater visibility to training tools/options would be a plus. It’s easy to publish YouTube videos these days, I think they should make more of them.
• Differentiation would help, there’s not a lot out there to drive you to buy the product if you are well informed in the market. If you know the market, you steer towards the large or trendy products. It’s a good product, but lost in the noise of the field I think.
• Hitching the wagon to a major software brand (like Mule did to Salesforce) would help grow the user base, and thus increase the activity in the support community. More users also translates into product champions.

Incentivized

• Requires third-party drivers to connect to common data sources like SFDC, MS SQL, Postgres.
• Debugging errors from the logs is a complicated process.
• E-mail alert system is very primitive and needs customization to make it more modern,
• Cannot send SMS alerts for jobs.

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

We are happy with the software and its functionality. As a SAS-shop, DataFlux is a logical choice for complex data integration.

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

The main negative point is the use of a non-standard language for customizations, as well as the poor integration with non-SAS systems. However, there is no doubt that it is a high-performance and powerful product capable of responding optimally to certain requirements.

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

It worked as expected.

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

With SAS, you pay a license fee annually to use this product. Support is incredible. You get what you pay for, whether it's SAS forums on the SAS support site, technical support tickets via email or phone calls, or example documentation. It's not open source. It's documented thoroughly, and it works.

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

Oracle>DB2>MS SQL Server>GreenPlum>Vectorwise

Incentivized

Because of ease of using SAS DI and data processing speed. There were lots of issues with AWS Redshift on cloud environment in terms of making connections with the data sources and while fetching the data we need to write complex queries.

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

• We had to move out of VectorWise after using the database for 2 years. Hence no positive impacts.

Incentivized

• We have more users who can connect to the many different data sources.
• Our users do have existing SAS programming knowledge and that can carry over.
• Business functions are starting to rely on SAS Data Integration Studio work product shortly after introduction.

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