Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.
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TimeXtender
Score 9.0 out of 10
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TimeXtender was designed to be a holistic solution for data integration that empowers organizations to build data solutions 10x faster using metadata and low-code automation.
$1,600
per month
Pricing
SQL Server Integration Services
TimeXtender
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SSIS
TimeXtender
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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On-Demand pricing is pay as you go, month-to-month, with no commitment, at the "on-demand" price of $3.33/credit.
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.
TimeXtender has worked really well with our customers who have different data sources using complex data types in large quantities requiring a DW-like solution that can consolidate all data sources at one-HUB. TimeXtender does this well, and provides automation capabilities, the ability to easily handle slowly changing dimensions, handing data lineage and data security very well. TimeXtender has the ability to be very customizable, allowing the HUB to grow as your business does. TimeXtender's customer support team is super helpful and will work with you throughout your implementation to make sure you reach success with the product. The ROI for timeXtender versus competing products (there aren't many that do what timeXtender does) shows the investment to be worthwhile for the majority of organizations in today's data-rich corporate world.
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.
Product Marketing: As implementers and resellers of this technology, we loved it. But, convincing clients who had not previously heard of TX/Discovery Hub was more difficult than it could have been if the company had a larger marketing force behind it.
Relatively New to Market: it creates a learning curve for early implementers.
More information should be published on timeXtender's website about product lines, including testimonials.
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.
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
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.
For our clients, timeXtender was a much better solution. It offered a more cost-effective solution, easier integration, and better customer support for our complex client needs. The timeXtender team worked with us throughout the process to make sure we could create a success story that was repeatable for our clients, and they proved great partners.
