IBM DataStage vs. Talend ESB

DataStage is somewhat outdated for an ETL. I guess that's what makes it a bit lagged behind its competitors. It can be used for data processing, sure, but its performance seems to be lagging behind or quite slow given the server it is running from. I won’t depend on this application if it's handling a lot of mission-critical banking and business data.

Recommended for:

1. Multiple systems to interface for a task in the company (example: to sell an item your POS must communicate with the inventory software, then to accounting, then to service, etc).
2. When a task must bring information from several external services.
3. When you have to deal with multiple APIs.

Not recommended for:

1. Data transformation (although Talend has a software for that that works with Talend ESB)

Incentivized

• Connect to multiple types of data-sources including Oracle, Teradata, Snowflake, SQl Server.
• Powerful tool to load large volumes of data.
• Transformation stages allow us to reduce the amount of code needed to create ETL scripts.
• Allow us to synchronize and refresh data as much as needed.

Incentivized

• Up to 900 connectors included in the license with no extra cost
• Graphical UI to develop the Web Services
• You can begin with the community version to evaluate or start implementing a very uncomplicated ESB
• The Talend ESB Admin Control is very powerful with dashboards and reports to keep your IF working smoothly

Incentivized

• Technical support is a key area IBM should improve for this product. Sometimes our case is assigned to a support engineer and he has no idea of the product or services.
• Provide custom reports for datastage jobs and performance such as job history reports, warning messages or error messages.
• Make it fully compatible with Oracle and users can direct use of Oracle ODBC drivers instead of Data Direct driver. Same for SQL server.

Incentivized

• You have to log in to each module separately
• 900 connectors is a lot, but if you have a custom app to interface, you have to develop your connector

Incentivized

Because it is robust, and it is being continuously improved. DS is one of the most used and recognized tools in the market. Large companies have implemented it in the first instance to develop their DW, but finding the advantages it has, they could use it for other types of projects such as migrations, application feeding, etc.

Incentivized

It could load thousands of records in seconds. But in the Parallel version, you need to understand how to particionate the data. If you use the algorithms erroneously, or the functionalities that it gives for the parsing of data, the performance can fall drastically, even with few records. It is necessary to have people with experience to be able to determine which algorithm to use and understand why.

Incentivized

IBM offers different levels of support but in my experience being and IBM shop helps to get direct support from more knowledgeable technicians from IBM. Not sure on the cost of having this kind of support, but I know there's also general support and community blogs and websites on the Internet make it easy to troubleshoot issues whenever there's need for that.

Incentivized

With effective capabilities and easy to manipulate the features and easy to produce accurate data analytics and the Cloud services Automation, this IBM platform is more reliable and easy to document management. The features on this platform are equipped with excellent big data management and easy to provide accurate data analytics.

Incentivized

• First, it is a lot of cheaper than the closest competitor.
• Second, Talend ESB is in the same league as other stronger brands.
• Third, the functions and modules are a 360 solution to implement an ESB.

Talend has a different approach to license since it is based on programmers and run times, not to users of cores.

Incentivized

• It’s hard to say at this point, it delivers, but not quite as I expected. It takes a lot of resources to manage and sort this out (manpower, financial).
• Definitely, I don’t have the exact numbers, but given the data it processes, it is A LOT. So props to the developer of this application.
• Again, based on my experience, I’d choose other ETL apps if there is one that's more user-friendly.

• Considerably cheaper than oracle service bus
• As I said before, you can run a POC using the community version of Talend Studio.
• Built from Open Source/ well-proven technologies, and a big community to support those technologies.

Incentivized