Sequel Pro vs. SolarWinds Task Factory

• Super easy for quick development and investigation
• The interface of exporting tables to SQL can be made better, it's not easy to manually check
• Not suitable for designing your DB
• Connections over SSH to vagrant and Docker hosted DBs
• Auto suggestion can be better

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Editing existing data. Editing record contents is trivial in Sequel Pro, while not nearly as easy in MySQL Workbench or phpMyAdmin.
• Deleting data - even simpler than editing data.
• Inserting new data - using "Duplicate row" then making needed changes is very simple.

Incentivized

• The Slowly Changing Dimension Component saves us a huge amount if time compared to the native SSIS component.
• JSON Transform is really useful to convert record and send it to rest API.
• The advanced derived columns allow us to use really cool functions that are not available in the regular transforms.

Incentivized

• Improving the way we create new connections to remote databases
• I couldn't find any way to configure my local server (MySQL), so I need to make changes on server outside the application. I know that there are other tools that integrate it, so you don’t have to leave the workflow
• It could have a feature to integrate our databases or connections (favorites) with other devices, like using Google Drive or Dropbox. It would be really useful!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is easy to use, but the design could use updating as it's very dated.

Incentivized

Compared to some of the other transformations I have worked with, it really is pretty simple for the type of functionality you get

Incentivized

It's open-source and very convenient to work with. I can easily import any database I want using a data dump and runt the queries on them to derive the data insights on the data. I might want to use Excel to visualize that, that might be one of the disadvantages.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall it went smoothly. Had a couple of gotchas with licensing and upgrading but nothing that really stopped us.

Incentivized

MySQL workbench is good to work with MySQL databases, but Sequel Pro gives us the ability to work with any SQL databases. It's open-source, lightweight and solves the problem that I am required to solve to run the DDL and DML queries.

Incentivized

I've not found too many tools to bolt onto SSIS that encompass what you get with Task Factory. I have used some Enterprise ETL tools like Dell's Boomi, but did not find it to be very intuitive. Task Factory does not leave you guessing how to use its components. Additionally, their support is very responsive and helpful.

Incentivized

• Unreliability has lead to wasted time and frustration among staff.
• The ease of testing database changes and modifying test data WHEN IT WORKS theoretically makes testing quick and easy but in reality, this is far outweighed by the wasted time and frustration involved with it not being reliable.
• The ease of seeing the relations between tables is very nice and saves time when trying to see how unfamiliar tables are connected.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized