Likelihood to Recommend Navicat Premium is a very well-rounded tool with a reasonable licensing fee given its feature set. It is primarily suited for technical resources who must work with a variety of different database systems, but who may not be database or command line tool wizards. However, its query building and job batch scheduling feature support end-users as they build competency, and it continues to hold its value even as users outgrow their training wheels. Navicat is probably not so appropriate for DBAs and others for whom database development and management is already a career path; these folks have their preferred toolsets, both vendor-supplied and homegrown, and they might consider the additional licensing cost to outweigh the value they'd personally get out of Navicat.
Read full review Since I started working with this great tool all data analysis programs have been running effectively. Implementation of projects and tasks have been effective and reliable. Data collected from each department gives us working plan on better management of various programs. The Dimension Merge SCD Transform helps us to load large volumes of data within a short period of time.
Read full review Pros Access via standard html Alert notification Read full review The single most beneficial component to Task Factory is the Upsert component. If you're familiar with writing MERGE statements in T-SQL, you'll appreciate the Upsert component. Drag the component into your Data Flow and a few clicks later you have a MERGE without the code complexities. Where some native SSIS components leave you wanting more, Task Factory extends on many of these components as well as support for data sources not native to SSIS components. The number of extra components that come in the Task Factory tool kit will expand your tool belt to do just about anything you need or want to accomplish in SSIS. Read full review Cons Navicat Premium's documentation can be hit-or-miss, as there are several versions available, and it's not always clear which documentation is current for the version at hand. Navicat Premium's query building interface is not as easy to use or feature-rich as standard IDE and text editor tools, and I've had some issues in the most recent release build with queries auto-running in the middle of making edits, causing a lack of responsiveness in the inbuilt editor -- however, Navicat offers users the ability to edit queries via an external editor, which mitigates these issues to some degree. In the data browser view, paged data navigation sometimes behaves unexpectedly or fails to work whatsoever, requiring a session restart to correct. The process of saving a data export file is cumbersome, requiring navigation through several windows, and I believe it could be significantly streamlined to improve user experience. Read full review It was built by Pragmatic Works who sold it to SentryOne and now Solar Winds, concerned about future support. SolarWinds is discontinuing support for related products such as BiXpress. Had issues with connecting to certain versions of SQL Server - would fail when deploying one package - had to deploy the entire solutions. Occasional random failures observed with the Filter tranform. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Task Factory has become a key product for our use of doing ETL work in SSIS. Their custom SSIS components allow us to work simply on the data engineering side of things. We can ignore the lower level work needed to connect to disparate data sources. This allows us to work faster and provide more value to the business
Read full review Usability Compared to some of the other transformations I have worked with, it really is pretty simple for the type of functionality you get
Read full review Support Rating Very robust online community and well as excellent support staff. Easy to follow video tutorials. Detailed sample configurations are provided with guided walk-throughs via remote classroom instruction. Very fast response from support staff. No internal hires were necessary for support as vendor support staff fully met all technical expertise. 24/7 incident reporting and tracking is great.
Read full review Overall, the best vendor we currently have on the data side of the house. No issues, issues are resolved very quickly and upgrades go without any issues.
Read full review Implementation Rating Overall it went smoothly. Had a couple of gotchas with licensing and upgrading but nothing that really stopped us.
Read full review Alternatives Considered While
Sequel Pro is a great shareware tool, it's limited to MySQL databases; while our department does use MySQL databases, we also use Oracle databases, so Navicat Premium's multi-product support is an absolute requirement. Navicat Premium also provides data browser support, including filtering, to empower less technically-minded users to query and manipulate databases, an option not available in
Sequel Pro . And the job scheduling and batching features of Navicat Premium further distinguish it above the admirable, if limited,
Sequel Pro .
Read full review ZappySys is an alternative provider that we tested. However, we found the ease of use, set up and installation to be much simplier and quicker using Task Factory. ZappySys has a number of the same connectors but are more difficult to setup and the GUI is not as intuitive and simple to use.
Read full review Return on Investment Similar features to OEM provided very easy to use, out-of-the-box functionality. No large infrastructure changes were needed to deploy and install. Read full review We were able to support our developers with Task Factory features and reduce the development time by 40%. Recently Task Factory has changed their pricing module and it seems to be pretty costly for our process. Our business team has started to evaluate whether this is worth it going forward. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Task Factory Screenshots