HCL DataConnect vs. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) vs. Talend Open Studio (discontinued)

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

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

For quick daily integrations Talend is a very good tool and it makes development time so short and easy. Citizen developers who are not great programmers can pick up and start using Talend Open Studio within weeks. It's well suited for all kinds of data migration between various systems. It is less appropriate for smaller synchronous services where you need to trace the complete transaction and how data moved between them. It's also less appropriate for small data movements where other tools can be easier to use and manage.

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

• 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

• Your developers will be able to design SOA services graphically, and it is very easy to document and implement the code.
• Talend Open Studio is based on Eclipse IDE, so your developers will be very comfy using it
• Open is Key in Talend Open Studio = Open Source

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

• 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

• The community is not that up to date and forum is not that great in response. Probably we should make people aware of the tool more on how to use and its implementations.
• Talend crashes when transforming a lot of data (millions of rows).
• Proper training documentation is a must for talend which is currently lagging. This will help users to learn more about Talend and use it effectively.

Incentivized

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

There is no licence requirement for Talend Open Studio. So, this is not relevant question. However, if you are asking whether we will use Talend in future. Yes. We will continue to use it. It's very powerful free tool which caters to all our extra, transform, load capabilities. We just love Talend for it's great functionality and ease of use.

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

Talend Open Studio is based on Eclipse and is full of redundant procedures to do one thing, like when installing libraries. Sometimes I cannot manually download the libraries that it can't find.

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

Many times, Talend freezes. When you give a cancel command, it takes several minutes to stop. It also takes a great toll on our PC with 16 GB of ram and I7 CPU, even in idle status. If you are downloading Maven Jar/Libraries, you cannot do anything and have to wait until the task is finished.

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

Talend Open Studio is free and we are not using the enterprise version which comes with licence and support. So, mostly depend on the open source community for any issues that we face. The document is good and we didn't have to use any support so far. We did evaluate the enterprise version and so far sticking to the free version.

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

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

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

Informatica has a limited number of components that you can use. This places a heavy limitation on the capabilities of Informatica. On the other hand, Talend allows you to create your own custom components using Java. For businesses that need to perform a wide variety of data operations, it can be quite useful to have the option of creating your own custom components to satisfy business needs.

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

• 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

• I delivered projects the client did not believe were possible, and I provided intermediate value by providing visibility to hidden data problems in their systems they could not detect before.
• I was able to work 3 projects at a time, pausing gracefully in one while switching to the other, with minimal effort.

Incentivized