Informatica PowerCenter was data integration technology designed to form the foundation for data integration initiatives, application migration, or analytics. It is a legacy product.
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Qlik Replicate
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Qlik Replicate enables organizations to accelerate data real-time replication, ingestion and streaming via change data capture, across a wide range of heterogeneous databases, data warehouses and data lake platforms.
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SSIS
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.
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Pricing
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
Qlik Replicate
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
Qlik Replicate
SSIS
Free Trial
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Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Community Pulse
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
Qlik Replicate
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Considered Multiple Products
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
PowerCenter can be run from different types of OSs and can integrate with multiple types of databases and applications compared to SSIS. PowerCenter performs better with any type of database due to its ability to use native drivers to read as well as load data. Due to its seam …
SSIS is a good entry into ETL, for smaller organizations or Microsoft-centric companies. It's strengths lie in its ease-of-use, quick turnaround, and simplicity. Its weaknesses lie in scalability and re-usability (you can achieve re-usability, however segmentation is at the …
Qlik Replicate's power is in its simple 1:1 copying of database tables and architecture and maintaining a near real-time copy of that database. Talend and SSIS are different tools and more for custom ETL's that require various steps to connect to SFTP or download files. …
Qlik Replicate / Attunity was able to be put on our server behind our firewall where with Fivetran would have required. Fivetran would also have required a different SQL server CDC setup. HVR was just as powerful if not more but was more costly and the user interface was not …
Simple to do one-to-one copy and very reliable, as other tools a little complex in setting up the pipelines and scheduling parts. Very simple to connect to the SFTP locations and easy to download them as well.
We selected Qlik Replicate because it was the easiest to use with the least network overhead. The team was able to master the application in under an hour--significantly less than IBM or Informatica.
SSIS is similar to Alteryx and Informatica PowerCenter in a way because these are all drag-and-drop ETL tools with similar functionality. Alteryx is a step ahead because it has some advanced ETL functionalities including statistical calculations etc. and a better ability to set …
I personally prefer SSIS. There are items that each do better than the others, but the ease of use of SSIS, along with its extensibility to 3rd party, ability to write any code required in the tool, and uses the same IDE for the MS BI suite (more of an issue if you're not a …
SQL Server is already in our wheelhouse so it only made sense to utilize the tools we already had available to us--SSIS, SSAS, & SSRS. Other non-technical users seem to be more comfortable using alternatives to SSIS. However, these alternatives are not as good as SSIS at …
1.- Scenaries with poor sources of data is not recomended (Very bad ROI). The solution is for medium-big enterprises with a lot of sources of data and users. 2.- Bank and finance enviroment to integrate differente data form trading, Regulatory reports, decisions makers, fraud and financial crimes because in this kind of scenary the quality of data is the base of the business. 3.- Departments of development and test of applications in enterprises because you can design enviroments, out of the production systems, to development and test the new API's or updateds made.
Qlik Replicate works very well with relational data platforms, both on premise and in the cloud, for example Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and others, it also works very well with DB2. If the data source is MongoDB, it is more complicated and currently there is no possibility of sending data to MongoDB.
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.
Informatica Powercenter is an innovative software that works with ETL-type data integration. Connectivity to almost all the database systems.
Great documentation and customer support.
It has a various solution to address data quality issues. data masking, data virtualization. It has various supporting tools or MDM, IDQ, Analyst, BigData which can be used to analyze data and correct it.
Replicate is extremely stable and does not generate a lot of alerts/failures/issues that take up time to troubleshoot.
It is very easy to add new source tables to a Replicate task so that we're always in sync with new data available from the CRM.
It's nice that Qlik Replicate also allows you to create a job to stop and then restart your tasks during maintenance windows that occur on both the source and target systems.
There are too many ways to perform the same or similar functions which in turn makes it challenging to trace what a workflow is doing and at which point (ex. sessions can be designed as static or re-usable and the override can occur at the session or workflow, or both which can be counter productive and confusing when troubleshooting).
The power in structured design is a double edged sword. Simple tasks for a POC can become cumbersome. Ex. if you want to move some data to test a process, you first have to create your sources by importing them which means an ODBC connection or similar will need to be configured, you in turn have to develop your targets and all of the essential building blocks before being able to begin actual development. While I am on sources and targets, I think of a table definition as just that and find it counter intuitive to have to design a table as both a source and target and manage them as different objects. It would be more intuitive to have a table definition and its source/target properties defined by where you drag and drop it in the mapping.
There are no checkpoints or data viewer type functions without designing an entire mapping and workflow. If you would like to simply run a job up to a point and check the throughput, an entire mapping needs to be completed and you would workaround this by creating a flat file target.
The base Replicate web GUI is lacking. If you have dozens or more tasks, it's hard to get a sense of how they're performing. Enterprise Manager solves all of these problems but is a separate install.
The support portal is extremely difficult to navigate. It's hard to track down exactly what you're looking for.
It would be helpful to have better documentation and example queries for the tables in the Enterprise Manager analytics database.
Destination databases that don't support common DDL commands behave unpredictably. And the replication of schema changes isn't consistent.
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.
The availability of the replicated data in disparate environments has is now crucial. Replacing a product like Qlik Replicate would require significant time, investments, and work. In addition, Qlik Replicate is reasonably reliable with few failures.
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
Positives; - Multi User Development Environment - Speed of transformation - Seamless integration between other Informatica products. Negatives; - There should be less windows to maintain developers' focus while using. You probably need 2 big monitors when you start development with Informatica Power Center. - Oracle Analytical functions should be natively used. - E-LT support as well as ETL support.
We now have greater business flexibility and scalability, and our big data integration projects have a quick rate of growth, which has been profitable for us. Independent of the sources involved, maintaining data consistency between sources is easy. One of my favorite features is the way it lets owners of the source system start and stop processes from updating their system windows.
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.
PowerCenter is robust and fast, and it does a great job meeting all the needs, not just the most commercially vocal needs. In the hands of an expert power user, you can accomplish almost anything with your data. It is not for new users or intermittent users-- for that the Cloud version is a better fit. Be prepared for costly connectors (priced differently for each source or destination you are working with), and just be planful of your projects so you are not paying for connectors you no longer need or want
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.
Informatica power center is a leader of the pack of ETL tools and has some great abilities that make it stand out from other ETL tools. It has been a great partner to its clients over a long time so it's definitely dependable. With all the great things about Informatica, it has a bit of tech burden that should be addressed to make it more nimble, reduce the learning curve for new developers, provide better connectivity with visualization tools.
The issue I've had is that Qlik does an awful job of keeping their customers informed when new versions of the software are available. We found that we were using a version that was no longer supported and could never get help. When it came time to get us upgraded so that we were on a current version, no one knew how to help get us to where we needed to be. We had to purchased professional services time and even then I was basically on my own to get everything built out and set up. Qlik needs to be more proactive with communicating about new releases and how to get your version upgraded in the most secure, safe way possible.
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.
Follow the directions from the Qlik documentation. They are pretty straight forward and easy enough to follow. If you follow these, then you are not likely to have issues on implementation.
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
While Talend offers a much more comfortable interface to work with, Informatica's forte is performance. And on that front, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration certainly leaves Talend in the dust. For a more back-end-centric use case, Informatica is certainly the ETL tool of choice. On the other hand, if business users would be using the tool, then Talend would be the preferred tool.
Great tool for data replication solution for Oracle/SQLServers/etc. Real easy to get it set up and start realizing business value. Getting the PoC accomplished in a short window. Product costing and easy to start small and scale as needed. It helped cover most of our ask compared to other solutions.
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
The data pipeline automation capability of Informatica means that few resources are needed to pre-process the data that ultimately resides in a Data Warehouse. Once a workflow is implemented, manual intervention is not needed.
PowerCenter did require more resources and time for installation and configuration than was expected/planned for.
The lack of or minimal support of unstructured data means that newer sources of dynamic/changing data cannot be easily processed/transformed through PowerCenter workflows.
Prior to using Qlik Replicate, we used an ETL solution to copy data from the Oracle ERP system to the Microsoft SQL Server BI system at a 15-minute interval. It was very tedious to maintain. Qlik Replicate is much easier to use and we replicate data near real-time now.
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.
