Microsoft SQL Server vs. SQL Server Integration Services

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft SQL Server
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database.
$1,418
Per License
SSIS
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.N/A
Pricing
Microsoft SQL ServerSQL Server Integration Services
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$1,418.00
Per License
Enterprise
$13,748.00
Per License
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft SQL ServerSSIS
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft SQL ServerSQL Server Integration Services
Considered Both Products
Microsoft SQL Server
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
[Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
Compared to free versions, SQL Server just blows away the free/open-source software. Things just run faster, and better, and at less overhead. This is truer and truer with the later versions. Microsoft just invests so much into research and development into their product. And …
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
When we looked at Oracle, the cost comes up and Oracle is far more costly in terms of TCO compared to Microsoft SQL Server. MySQL is very cost-effective, however, it is not as Enterprise-ready in that our 3rd party products such as financials do not run on MySQL so, for a small …
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
My-SQL, Oracle. My-SQL - recently they coped up a lot on contrast to MS - SQL server with all the latest features.
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
SQL Server is a better choice for quick time to market solutions and for easier maintenance. Oracle Database setup and programming to support solutions has a harder learning curve and it requires more time and effort to hit the ground running.

An organization having invested …
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
The reason we've decided to go with Microsoft over Oracle or MySQL is because our company lives in the Microsoft ecosystem. It works well with other Microsoft products (Exchange, Office, etc.). It allows for easier integration. Also, the support from Microsoft is crucial, in …
Chose Microsoft SQL Server

SQL Server is a full feature robust platform with relatively mature coding standards. Interactivity with other Microsoft products enhances my workflow with minimal installation headaches.

In contrast, easier licensing for MySQL and SQLite gives them a definite advantage, …

Chose Microsoft SQL Server
There's really no comparison between Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL tools. While the others, particularly access, make certain plug and play features easy to use (e.g. forms, simple reports), it can not offer the array of integration options and general scalability, …
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
I have used Microsoft Access, MySQL, and I have been a user of systems that run on Oracle database servers. All but Oracle are really intended for smaller scale projects and teams as they start to get slow or the performance will suffer once you start getting lots of data input …
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
MS SQL server is the best database management tool available and it has been improving every year addressing the needs for ever growing data.
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
I have been a SQL Server focused professional for over 20 years, so SQL Server is my first choice. I have experience and comfort, and the ability to get up to speed quickly. Oracle has been too expensive, though I think it has performed similar to SQL Server in the applications …
SSIS
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
We just selected SSIS because we use SQL Server Management System (SSMS) to manage our database. As SSIS is a component of the Microsoft SQL Server there are no problems with integration and everything works perfectly. In addition, we don't have to learn how to use another …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
SSIS is similar to Alteryx and Informatica PowerCenter in a way because these are all drag-and-drop ETL tools with similar functionality. Alteryx is a step ahead because it has some advanced ETL functionalities including statistical calculations etc. and a better ability to set …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Server is already in our wheelhouse so it only made sense to utilize the tools we already had available to us--SSIS, SSAS, & SSRS. Other non-technical users seem to be more comfortable using alternatives to SSIS. However, these alternatives are not as good as SSIS at …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
These are all great products and, honestly, can move data faster. They include more enterprise features and have some great qualities about each. However, they all cost a lot depending on the implementation you need. With SQL Server Integration Services, you do not have any …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
When looking to evaluate different options, we looked first to the experience and software we had in-house that would accomplish the job. When assessing alternatives outside we were looking for the tool that would offer the most flexibility.

SSIS provided the most robust set of …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
SSIS is a very basic, developer-oriented ETL tool and while it lacks many of the nice UX features of its competitors it is a powerful tool that comes as a part of SQL Server and, in the hands of experienced developers with domain knowledge, can meet most organizations' ETL …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
SSIS and Denodo differ in their approaches to ETL and Data integrations. SSIS is more affordable from a cost and licensing perspective (if you have Microsoft licensing), but Denodo is no slouch. If you go with Denodo, you are not creating data, there are pros and cons to …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
SSIS has more configuration options and its smooth running GUI (in visual studio) makes implementation easier. It's ability to provide visual programming and allow users to input code for more complex logic and configuration gives users a great degree of flexibility.
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
Unfortunately SSIS is the only ETL tool I have used by far. I used Dundas BI before, didn't like its ETL component, but that is more of a data visualization tool.
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
I've used several other ETL tools and they can all do the trick once you learn how to get around their shortfalls, including SSIS. I think the best reason to use SSIS is if you're already using Microsoft tools. They integrate well with each other and it's easy to understand how …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
While Clover provides a number of the same data transformation techniques, it is not nearly as robust as SSIS. It also requires knowledge of the specific scripting language while SSIS allows the user to choose from a number of commonly-used scripting languages (i.e. VB, C#, …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
SAP Data Services is a very good tool and overall its easier to use than SSIS, but SAP is at a much higher price point than Microsoft. Microsoft can be a good fit for businesses of any size, but SAP tends to be a better fit for larger businesses.
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
We utilize a Microsoft SQL Server backend, because of SSIS's integration with MSSQL, it was a no brainer for us!
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
Among the various ETL products on the market, I only used DataStage. I think that SQL Server Integration Services is much more intuitive than many others and allows for relatively little time to create a viable and very powerful solution. That obviously requires the right …
Features
Microsoft SQL ServerSQL Server Integration Services
Data Source Connection
Comparison of Data Source Connection features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
SQL Server Integration Services
7.5
55 Ratings
9% below category average
Connect to traditional data sources00 Ratings9.055 Ratings
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL00 Ratings6.042 Ratings
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
SQL Server Integration Services
7.8
55 Ratings
4% below category average
Simple transformations00 Ratings10.055 Ratings
Complex transformations00 Ratings5.554 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
SQL Server Integration Services
7.6
53 Ratings
3% below category average
Data model creation00 Ratings9.028 Ratings
Metadata management00 Ratings7.034 Ratings
Business rules and workflow00 Ratings7.044 Ratings
Collaboration00 Ratings9.040 Ratings
Testing and debugging00 Ratings6.050 Ratings
Data Governance
Comparison of Data Governance features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
SQL Server Integration Services
5.3
43 Ratings
40% below category average
Integration with data quality tools00 Ratings6.038 Ratings
Integration with MDM tools00 Ratings4.538 Ratings
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Microsoft SQL ServerSQL Server Integration Services
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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IBM InfoSphere Information Server
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Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP IQ
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Microsoft SQL ServerSQL Server Integration Services
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(102 ratings)
8.0
(54 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(6 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Usability
7.6
(16 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(25 ratings)
8.0
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(5 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft SQL ServerSQL Server Integration Services
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Microsoft SQL is ubiquitous, while MySQL runs under the hood all over the place. Microsoft SQL is the platform taught in colleges and certification courses and is the one most likely to be used by businesses because it is backed by Microsoft. Its interface is friendly (well, as pleasant as SQL can be) and has been used by so many for so long that resources are freely available if you encounter any issues.
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Microsoft
As I mentioned earlier SQL Server Integration Services is suitable if you want to manage data from different applications. It really helps in fetching the data and generating reports. Its automation make it very easy and time efficient. It works well with large database as well. But it doesn't work well with real time data, it will take some time to gather the real time data. I would not recommend using it in a real time/fast-paced environment.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net
  • Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis
  • Data Security
  • Easy to understand and use
  • Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script
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Microsoft
  • Standard ETL use cases for daily loads
  • Loading incoming data from Vendors which is placed on FTP and adding them to the SQL Warehouse
  • Creating outgoing data files and writing them to Vendor FTPs
  • Easy Active Directory integration for seamless connections to SQL Server
  • CI/CD by hosting the code on visualstudio.com
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition has a high cost but is the only edition which supports SQL Always On Availability Groups. It would be nice to include this feature in the Standard version.
  • Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server is a quite complex matter, it would be good to simplify licensing in the future. For example, per core vs per user CAL licensing, as well as complex licensing scenarios in the Cloud and on Edge locations.
  • It would be good to include native tools for converting Oracle, DB2, Postgresql and MySQL/MariaDB databases (schema and data) for import into Microsoft SQL Server.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Connection managers for online data sources can be tricky to configure.
  • Performance tuning is an art form and trialing different data flow task options can be cumbersome. SSIS can do a better job of providing performance data including historical for monitoring.
  • Mapping destination using OLE DB command is difficult as destination columns are unnamed.
  • Excel or flat file connections are limited by version and type.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
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Microsoft
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
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Usability
Microsoft
SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
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Microsoft
SSIS is a great tool for most ETL needs. It has the 90% (or more) use cases covered and even in many of the use cases where it is not ideal SSIS can be extended via a .NET language to do the job well in a supportable way for almost any performance workload.
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Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
Its does not have outages.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Performance
Microsoft
SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
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Microsoft
SQL Server Integration Services performance is dependent directly upon the resources provided to the system. In our environment, we allocated 6 nodes of 4 CPUs, 64GB each, running in parallel. Unfortunately, we had to ramp-up to such a robust environment to get the performance to where we needed it. Most of the reports are completed in a reasonable timeframe. However, in the case of slow running reports, it is often difficult if not impossible to cancel the report without killing the report instance or stopping the service.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
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Microsoft
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.
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In-Person Training
Microsoft
It was good
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Microsoft
very hands on and detailed training
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
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Microsoft
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
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
[Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Read full review
Microsoft
I think SQL Server Integration Services is better suited for on-premises data movement and ADF is more suited for the cloud. Though ADF has more connectors, SQL Server Integration Services is more robust and has better functionality just because it has been around much longer
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Scalability
Microsoft
SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting.
  • Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports.
  • Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives.
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Microsoft
  • Without this, we would have to manually update a spreadsheet of our SQL Server inventory
  • We would also have poor alerting; if an instance was down we wouldn't know until it was reported by a user
  • We only have one other person who uses SQL Server Integration Services , he's the expert. It would fall to me without him and I would not enjoy being responsible for it.
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ScreenShots