SharePlex really shines when set alongside GoldenGate. The licensing costs of the two products would appear to place them in entirely different ballparks yet they perform nearly identically in practice. SharePlex is suitable for heterogenous replication of one database to another. The list of targets is ever increasing, with support for all major RDBMS vendors as well as support for popular NoSQL and JSON replication. SharePlex is effective when replicating from on-premise to cloud. Whether that's migrating data, creating a high-availability presence in a public or private cloud, or populating a data mart, it does the job quite well.
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.
When first introduced the Change Data Capture process was awkward. Each subsequent release has improved the process.
Sometimes the Shareplex monitoring service in Foglight gets overly aggressive in sending out error notifications and can end up spamming the admins with email alerts for one problem. We have had to tone that down.
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.
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
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.
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.
Support is very responsive. They take ownership of the problems and see them through to the finish. When a bug is found they work towards developing testing and making the fix available to us to solve the problem.
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
SharePlex support is an award-winning team, which is available for 24 hours, and any time they have solutions with perfect expertise. Besides, SharePlex has supported data migration, with multiple reporting features that ensure there are comprehensive database evaluations. The simplicity of SharePlex installation also gives it a higher mark, is very efficient, and allows companies to understand it easily.
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.
