Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.
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Vertify
Score 7.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
VertifyData is a cloud-based integration platform with core integration capacities, including a drag-and-drop interface and real-time synchronization. It also offers over 80 prebuilt connectors and templates, plus customizable integrations for scaling businesses.
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.
I would recommend it, as VertifyData exactly fit our use case. I can't speak for all use cases and all connectors - naturally - but the ones we are using and have explored so far, work perfectly well. Also, being a person myself that is not fluent in SQL or JSON or API language in general, I was still able to create all workflows our company needed myself. Which I consider a huge benefit.
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.
Creating a mapping between source and target while also using lookups and transformations is not trivial. And VertifyData solved this reasonably well, at least all users in my organization understood it pretty quickly.
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.
It is not the easiest user interface to read/understand. However, once you understand how it works, then using it is not that bad. It's hard to remember what feature is listed under what tab (Manage vs. Define). A suggestion would be to get all call to actions on the same page
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.
Vertify offered more flexibility and was presented as a simple solution. In reality, it is more complex that we envisioned and we have never fully utilized our tools due to the lack of ability to configure things properly.
