The Anypoint Platform developed by MuleSoft and acquired by Salesforce in early 2018 is designed to
connect apps, data, and devices anywhere, on-premises or in the cloud. This platform was built to
offer out-of-the-box connectors as well as tools that architects and developers can adopt quickly to
design, build and manage the entire lifecycle of their APIs, applications, and products.
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SSIS
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.
Fivetran, Stitch, and Etleap are all 1000x more modern than SSIS and 100x less aggravating. While those tools are mainly used to sync data rather than transform it, the ELT model works much better than the ETL model in most situations.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is best tool in the market for developing APIs with complex structures communicating with various different types of applications including web applications as well as legacy applications. Also applications including database connectivity for fetching and updating data in the DB tables. I cant think of any scenario which MuleSoft Anypoint Platform could not be used for developing the integrations.
Ideal if the company is already a Microsoft shop, so chances are that it is free with SQL Server. Also, good for moving data between on premise systems. Not ideal for moving data to the cloud. No functionality out of the box to work with REST APIs. Stable product but definitely not the future
Has more features than what we really need so we're paying for more than we use. Sort of like paying for an Abrams tank when all we really need is a Toyota Corolla.
Not a value product, tends to be expensive.
Takes a while for developers to learn to use Mulesoft Anypoint.
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.
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
Because this product is still releasing a lot of new functionality, it also comes with many bugs that they’re still working to fix. So yes, that can cause issues when we’re developing any solutions.
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.
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.
Anypoint Platform support is very responsive. There is also a huge knowledge base and an active online forum where answers to most questions can be found. When needed support engages the engineering group so adequate solutions or workarounds are always provided.
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.
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
Once we have moved all of our system integration APIs to the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, we will need to communicate with a wide variety of external systems. All of our business and service logic is stored in the aforementioned core systems. Anypoint Platform (and all of our APIs) makes it easy to connect to various other platforms. In order to link to these many other systems, connectors and/or components are utilized, and they are simple to configure and integrate.
I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
