SAP Data Services vs. SQL Server Integration Services

It's definitely one of the leading ETL tools, and it's the best ETL tool to use with SAP integration. If you use SAP HANA, then you should think about Data Services as your primary ETL tool.

Incentivized

Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.

Incentivized

• Integration with SAP ERP/ECC works really well.
• A lot of flexibility in data creation, with different types of communication capabilities like BAPIs, IDocs, and Batch input.
• Reliable and consistent results and easily enforceable data templates.

Incentivized

• Ease of use - can be used with no prior experience in a relatively short amount of time.
• Flexibility - provides multiple means of accomplishing tasks to be able to support virtually any scenario.
• Performance - performs well with default configurations but allows the user to choose a multitude of options that can enhance performance.
• Resilient - supports the configuration of error handling to prevent and identify breakages.
• Complete suite of configurable tools.

Incentivized

• Debugging is not very easy. When one wants to see the flow of data from one Query to another, the process is not very smooth and efficient.
• A lot of functions do not behave the way they should. I have faced problems with the count() function.
• I have faced problems while loading Excel files. The same set of options will work in one case but not in the other.

Incentivized

• SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming.
• When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant.
• While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.

Incentivized

Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.

Incentivized

As other SAP products, there is excellent support by SAP on this tool. You can access the SAP Help portal in order to give support either from the huge community or directly from SAP.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

You cannot afford to run your business on questionable data. With SAP® Data Services software, you can access, transform, and connect data to fuel your critical business processes. Together, these enterprise-class solutions enable data integration and data quality, providing the right level of insight across your business so you can make better decisions and operate more effectively.SAP Data Services was previously known as SAP BusinessObjects Data Services, SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator, BusinessObjects Data Integrator.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Very positive impact in jobs maintenance since support auto-documentation.
• Great impact on learning curve.
• Great results in our Data Quality Projects.

Incentivized

• Data integrity across various products allows unify certain processes inside the organization and save funds by reducing human labour factor.
• Automated data unification allows us plan our inputs better and reduce over-warehousing by overbuying
• The employee number, responsible for data management was reduced from 4 to 1 person

Incentivized