Pentaho vs Talend Open Studio

• First thing what I have experienced about Pentaho is that it is user friendly. The best thing about Pentaho is Pentaho Data Integration. I have never used more user friendlier ETL tool like PDI. All the jobs and transformation steps are easy to understand. And I like the sample transformations and jobs that are provided with the package. It is so user friendly that, even if you don't know SQL, it will generate it for you. If you don't want to write scripts, that's fine, you can do it in PDI.
• I have found that Pentaho can be integrated with any technology or framework. I have easily and successfully integrated it with HDFS, EMR, S3, CouchDB, many different RDBMSs. I would consider it as a strength of Pentaho. Also if you are stuck or you find any error, the type of logging will have an answer for you. I found the logging mechanism very effective.
• I have mostly used Pentaho Analyzer and Schema Workbench at the BI side. It is user friendly too and we have a very few users who come to the developers to help them understanding the UI of PUC.

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• Talend provides pre-built widgets to integrate with databases, web services, and FTP for example, which saves time and quality issues in building basic functionalities that are needed to create a full workflow.
• Using any tool, such as Talend, encourages a consistent mindset and approach for processing steps, rather than being 100% free-form logic based on the mood of the developer. This makes it easier to understand the workflow that is implemented, even if you are working with many different processes.
• Using Talend allowed me to work on a project to the point where the client needed to review it, pause development for a week or even 3 weeks if key people were very busy, and to resume work without much trouble at all. If I had been developing without such a tool, my custom code base would have been much larger, and I would have had more difficulty resuming work after such a break.

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• Most of the companies use star schema in their Data Warehouses but they are not the pure star schemas. There are the bridge tables, group tables but when using Schema Workbench to design a cube, it gets very painful for the developers to accommodate such schema in it. To do this, I have to go to the XML file and add the new elements. I would love to see the feature where Schema Workbench can accommodate the bridge tables as they are the part of star schema too.
• When it comes to ETL, I have found PDI to be the best tool, but at the report side, it is not as good as the other tools available in the market. Especially the users always complain about the graphs in the Pentaho Analyzer. I think. the UI needs a lot of improvement.
• PDI is slow reading the JSON files. There is a fast JSON input step available in the marketplace but I think I would be great if Pentaho can make the JSON reading even faster.
• When I export the repository, I see the files names are encoded with UTF-8 encoding. It would be great, if the spaces and the special characters can be preserved while exporting a BA repository.

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• Standard source control practices do not work the way you would expect them to when using Talend. The intermediate items that Talend creates in the workspace are not simply a set of .java files, so you must take extra care of managing your workspace directory. This means you must backup your entire workspace directory prior to upgrading the version of Talend you are using for active development. Granted, we should do this even when upgrading a basic Eclipse environment, but it is far easier to get back where you started if Eclipse gets messed up, than if Talend gets corrupted somehow. This is a key concern for developers, and gaining comfort with this is a matter of time committment to a single tool, which developers are hesitant to commit. There are options to help this in the team and enterprise versions of the tool, but those have their own barriers to adoption, money and agreement across a development team.
• It could take 2-3 weeks for an seasoned Java developer to gain comfort in how to best implement processes using Talend. It is worth it if you have a lot of projects that start, go on back-burner, then resume, or if you are switching between integration processes and wanting a standard way to build your programs

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• Good client feedback - caters to specific requirements
• Low learning curve for new staff
• Good community backup

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• 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.

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