IBM DataStage Reviews & Insights

Score7.7 out of 10

42 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM DataStage are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Excellent Mapping Tools: Users have expressed their satisfaction with the platform's superb mapping tools, which have proven invaluable for effective data management in a banking setting. The intuitive interface and robust functionality of these tools have significantly enhanced users' ability to visualize and analyze complex data structures.

Valuable Reporting Functions: Customers highly value the reporting functions for streamlined user data and account management in their daily operations. These functions provide comprehensive insights into various metrics, enabling informed decision-making processes within the banking environment.

Seamless Integration of Scripts and ETL Jobs: Reviewers appreciate the smooth integration of scripts and ETL jobs, coupled with detailed logging, enhancing collaborative data efforts. This seamless integration has reduced manual errors and improved overall efficiency in handling data transformation tasks across different operational areas.

Reviews

11 Reviews

Datastage general overview.

Rating: 6 out of 10

August 7, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It handles large business scale data. Since this an example of ETL software, it can handle large amount of data records especially banking information to our clients, migrating and generating them into new sets of information that we can utilize into a better tangible data for processing. It can generate alot of information based on a lot data dump that we can utilize for more business refined approach.

Pros

Executing batch jobs (datastage jobs).
Compiles a lot of datasets into a new set of information.
It creates more refined information based on what we create and define from the job logics created.

Cons

Parameter refreshes the variables that need to be refreshed all the time when a new job is deployed.
Defining variables one by one takes a lot of time especially those are hard coded.
Jobs are sometimes get hung.
Sessions locks up the jobs.

Likelihood to Recommend

DataStage is somewhat outdated for an ETL. I guess that's what makes it a bit lagged behind its competitors. It can be used for data processing, sure, but its performance seems to be lagging behind or quite slow given the server it is running from. I won’t depend on this application if it's handling a lot of mission-critical banking and business data.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Good ETL tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 22, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM DataStage is use as a ETL tool useful to extract information from the source systems (for example SAP ERP), to trasform them defining the correct logics to calculate KPIs and clean data (Data Quality checks). Morever it is used to read manul file from Business Users and to link them into the useful information for the BI tool.

Pros

Easy to use, you can manage both visual joins and transformation and SQL queries
Able to read from all source systems, there are all the needed connectors
It can orchestrate job at different levels and it is easily scalable

Cons

Many specific parameters are not well documented and therefore are difficult to use
The debugging option doesn't work well
datatype management is complex

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to create a complex environment with many running jobs linked together and manage dependencies it is very strong. If you want to build everything using custom features you loose pushdown advantage, so many times it is better to write directly SQL queries. Variables management can be really powerfull, but also difficult to set up if you are a beginner.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

IBM Inforsphere datastage review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is used for data analysis for business trending and banking aging report for the customers.It would be helpful for finding when the last transaction was done and when the future transaction would be coming for . IBM InfoSphere DataStagecan help with ease of access , easy of gui management and easy navigation for the user to great help

Pros

banking environment
user data management
user account management

Cons

data stage integration with cloud
integration with bmc
database management with datastage

Likelihood to Recommend

it is suited for the scenario where the major or more number users and transactions are involved.it would help with data analysis,of how many transactions, and what was the frequency of the transactions,how much amount was paid and how much was the due , and how many count of the refills done.

niman goli

Storage Lead in Sales at DXC Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Master of Data Mapping and Cloud Data Management IBM Platform.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 28, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The effective mapping product and highly effective for project data management and scalability is the best. Functions are simple to start with and all the features are easy to custom. The IBM platform offers the best mapping capability and the data modeling functions are excellent. The reports are excellent and effective.

Pros

Mapping tools are excellent.
Reporting functions.
Data collaboration.

Cons

The deep functions manipulation is tricky.
Tools are not easy to manipulate through Cloud services.
Ability to manage big data can be more functional.

Likelihood to Recommend

Excellent Cloud data mapping tool and easy creating multiple project data analytics in real-time and the report distribution are excellent via this IBM product. Easy tool to provide data visualization and the integration is effective and helpful to migrating huge amounts of data across other platforms and different websites insights gathering.

Edger Loredo

Project Manager in Engineering at Keyway (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

IBM datastage a detailed review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This is the primary tool that assists with Data movement and transformations from homogeneous and heterogeneous sources. Within the organization, this tool is extensively used to build warehouses and data marts that support downstream analytics. the Seamless nature of the product with the ability to weave shell scripts, python scripts, and data processing jobs into a single executable sequence is very helpful.

Pros

Data movement
Seamless integration of scripts and etl jobs
Descriptive logging
Ability to work with myriad of data assets
Direct integration for Governance catalog

Cons

Hierarchical stages to parse and build xmls and jsons needs improvement.
Web interface of the application also needs improvement.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM infosphere works exceptionally well as an ETL tool. It is relatively easy to pick up and the learning curve is not steep for a new user. From an integration perspective, Infosphere DataStage has connectors to all the prominent databases and files. The seamless integration with the Active directory helps manage the security and access privileges. A place to improve - web-based hierarchical stage.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

InfoSphere DataStage Data Integration tool

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DataStage for ETL development, creating jobs to extract the data from different source systems and transform the data to use with different databases, and load the data into the database tables/views using staging tables. We use DataStage with Cognos to show the glossary information for any particular field and track it all the way from the report to the source application.

Pros

Data integration
ETL jobs
Business Glossary
Creating snapshot views using jobs

Cons

Better interface for the job designs

Likelihood to Recommend

It helps minimize the project delivery cycle since it allows a common set of tools across IIS. MDM integrations are a plus.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

IBM DataStage is a nice ETL tool!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 9, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A few departments including IT department and Shadow IT groups within other departments in the company use the this tool at Office Depot. We recollect, load and transform data from multiple sources and applications including sales, inventory, financial information among others. Currently updating to the latest version of DataStage on the cloud and connecting to other cloud data-sources as well as data files and other types of data-sources.

Pros

Connect to multiple types of data-sources including Oracle, Teradata, Snowflake, SQl Server.
Powerful tool to load large volumes of data.
Transformation stages allow us to reduce the amount of code needed to create ETL scripts.
Allow us to synchronize and refresh data as much as needed.

Cons

Connector Stages to Snowflake on the cloud. We had some issues initially but since then had been corrected.
Accessing tool from a browser (zero foot-print). Currently we need to either install locally or connect to a server to do ETL work.
Diversify ways of authenticating users.

Likelihood to Recommend

DataStage is well suited for any size of company that's looking to move, transform, clean data and easily create data-warehouses that would help to make data ready to be presented for decision making. Data Stage would easily integrate with companies that use IBM DB2 as their main RDBMS.
A scenario where it less suited could be cost. I have noticed IBM tools tend to be a little more costly than average.

Herber Gonzalez

Lead Developer in Information Technology at Office Depot (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

IBM InfoSphere DataStage Review

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

February 12, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our company, IBM InfoSphere DataStage is the main ETL engine used by the data integration functions. It guarantees the integration of most of the company's analytical processes. The reliability and capillarity that has shown make it an essential tool for our needs.

Pros

reliability
capillarity

Cons

complexity
adaptability

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe that for the classic vision of integration, IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a reliable tool. It certainly cannot meet the latest requirements and does not guarantee the speed and versatility of the new data management systems.

Filippo Orlando

Data Analyst | Data Developer - Advanced Analytics in Information Technology at Unieuro S.p.A. (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

Great ETL software for complex data rules

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is mainly used by IT department as ETL software. It served as an efficient tool for us to extract data, transform and load data in the databases or provide the output file for users and other systems. With ODBC connections, it can connect Oracle, SQL, and other databases and open files to read and write.

Pros

Very reliable in handling data extraction, data transformation and loading
Flexibility in connecting to different type of databases, relational or non-relational
Great features such as parallel processing, hash handling, etc.
You can also take advantage of its FTP functions, and scheduling features if you need to.

Cons

Technical support is a key area IBM should improve for this product. Sometimes our case is assigned to a support engineer and he has no idea of the product or services.
Provide custom reports for datastage jobs and performance such as job history reports, warning messages or error messages.
Make it fully compatible with Oracle and users can direct use of Oracle ODBC drivers instead of Data Direct driver. Same for SQL server.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited if your data is quite complex and many data rules are in place. You have to write real complex data joins to generate output. While DataStage can handle it and provide you an intuitive design for support and analysis.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

DATASTAGE -ETL

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 31, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DS is one of the most powerful ETL tools on the market. Its connectors to different bases plus the pack make it a solid tool, and complete. It has a great number of functions, and the work with a big amount of data with DS is not complex (as long as you have the knowledge and know how to handle the partitioning algorithms, etc).
DataStage has improved over time. It has improved its connectors, added functionalities, making easier the programming and the maintenance of the development.

Pros

Connectivity.
Handling large numbers of records.
Varied partitioning algorithms.
Complementary packages of connectivity to applications, SAP, etc.

Cons

You must understand and know the algorithms, since the wrong use of them generates more time in processing.
Metadata. You need to develop with connectors, and taking all the Metadata from the menu, all the data that you complete manually, you can't track it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Recommend for:
Small and large data volumes
For development and processing of complex data (functions / routines)
File management
Migrating Data from a Database to other
When you need to track all the data loaded, because you can have all the information about the transformation, the derivation, and where it was used

Verified User

Team Lead in Customer Service (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

17 years of experience