HCL DataConnect vs. Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs. Amazon Redshift

The choice to use Actian DataConnect really comes down to pricing and the type of integration project you are performing, specifically with the requirements, whether you want the integration to be on-premise or in the cloud, can you install agents on your servers etc. For integration tools it runs head to head with its competitors.

Incentivized

II would recommend Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to someone looking to fully automate the transferring of data especially in a warehouse scenario though I can see the elasticity of the suite that is offered and can see it is applicable in other scenarios not just warehouses.

Incentivized

If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)

Incentivized

• Map multiple source and destination tables - what would be done in many steps in SSIS can be done in one or two "maps" in Data Integrator.
• Platform independent, cloud based, no client software.
• Conversion of data types, write flat files - this helps us with integrating systems.
• Fairly straightforward to use if the user has ETL experience.

Incentivized

• Very easy and fast to load data into the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
• Exceptionally fast retrieval of data joining 100 million row table with a billion row table plus the size of the database was reduced by a factor of 10 due to how Oracle store[s] and organise[s] data and indexes.
• Flexibility with scaling up and down CPU on the fly when needed, and just stop it when not needed so you don't get charged when it is not running.
• It is always patched and always available and you can add storage dynamically as you need it.

• [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
• [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
• [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
• [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.

Incentivized

• Integration Manager needs better scheduling improvements. Like dependencies, and not running a process again if the prior run is still running.
• New connector development does not seem a priority.

Incentivized

• It is very expensive product. But not to mention, there's good reasons why it is expensive.
• The product should support more cloud based services. When we made the decision to buy the product (which was 20 years ago,) there was no such thing to consider, but moving to a cloud based data warehouse may promise more scalability, agility, and cost reduction. The new version of Data Warehouse came out on the way, but it looks a bit behind compared to other competitors.
• Our healthcare data consists of 30% coded data (such as ICD 10 / SNOMED C,T) but the rests is narrative (such as clinical notes.). Oracle is the best for warehousing standardized data, but not a good choice when considering unstructured data, or a mix of the two.

Incentivized

• We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
• Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
• Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.

Incentivized

Because

• It is really simple to provision and configure.
• Does not require continous attention from the DBA, autonomous features allows the database to perform most of the regular admin tasks without need for human intervention.
• Allows to integrate multiple data sources on a central data warehouse, and explode the information stored with different analytic and reporting tools.

Incentivized

Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.

Incentivized

The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support

Incentivized

Understanding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is really simple, and Autonomous databases are even more. Using shared or dedicated infrastructure is one of the few things you need to consider at the moment of starting provisioning your Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.

Incentivized

Data Integrator was initially a part of a package deal for us with our new Student Information System. It was chosen prior to my arrival at the institution. Since I discovered we have SQL Server licenses, we have decided to use SSIS instead since I have a background in the MSBI stack and SSIS appears to be more straightforward (process flow philosophy vs "map" philosophy.)

Incentivized

As I mentioned, I have also worked with Amazon Redshift, but it is not as versatile as Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and does not provide a large variety of products. Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is also more reliable than Amazon Redshift, hence why I have chosen it

Incentivized

Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.

Incentivized

Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.

Incentivized

• Our customer likes the consistent reliable integrations we have built so we [got] a definite return on investment.
• Problems are fairly easy to handle and rework.

Incentivized

• Overall the business objective of all of our clients have been met positively with Oracle Data Warehouse. All of the required analysis the users were able to successfully carry out using the warehouse data.
• Using a 3-tier architecture with the Oracle Data Warehouse at the back end the mid-tier has been integrated well. This is big plus in providing the necessary tools for end users of the data warehouse to carry out their analysis.
• All of the various BI products (OBIEE, Cognos, etc.) are able to use and exploit the various analytic built-in functionalities of the Oracle Data Warehouse.

Incentivized

• Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
• Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
• Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.

Incentivized