SSIS Reviews

Consolidation into a standard tool for data movement makes maintenance and administration easier.

The extensibility of the tool has allowed us to fill the gaps with 3rd party add-ons.

Paying a license fee to the SSIS ETL vehicle for our enterprise projects increases our costs.

Because it is a powerful and performance ETL tool, data increases our business productivity.

Positive - easier to manage and maintain data imports and maintain consistency over time.

Positive - reusable projects reduces time for repetitive tasks.

Negative - learning curve. Variety and flexibility of possible solutions can be overwhelming.

By using SSIS, we have been able to eliminate simple, redundant data move operations that were conducted manually.

We have been able to build a stable data repository that combines data from different sources and provides a more holistic view of the business's data.

SSIS provided a flexible framework that we were able to use to connect to a variety of data sources--Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, CSV, and web--which enabled us to build a system for business-critical reporting.

We partner with other companies to help provide value to their customers. We had a number of them that requested reporting sent to their customers monthly. Our traditional Devs spec'd they would need up to a week toget that coded, tested and released. With SQL Server Integration Services and SQL Server Reporting Services we had the first iteration out in a day. This sends out over 3,000 reports, using our Partners Branding we get these out in less than 1 hour saving development resources.

In a growing company from Startup to Enterprise, integrating our home grown order entry into our ERP system was proving difficult by hand. Once I implemented SQL Server Integration Services we had it done in less than a month. This reduced our project implementation time by over 1 month which saved consulting time and expenses.

We use SQL Server Integration Services to backup our production boxes, cleanse and change the data to comply with different countries regulatory requirements, and restore that data to our Development and Test environments allowing our developers to have the most recent data set possible.

Enabled migration of complex business/customer data with one person resource.

Launched automated ETL package within weeks with less than 2 person resource.

No production failures/downtime since launch.

Because SSIS comes "free" with SQL Server, there is no additional one-time or recurring software license fee to pay.

SSIS has a fairly shallow learning curve so any Microsoft-oriented software development team can adopt it and put it into production service with very little training time needed.

Packages created in SSIS can easily be transitioned from development to production use either via direct deployment to SQL Server or via a deployment management system.

Like any IT department, we almost always have an MS SQL license and therefore also access to this tool, though the free version also works just fine with a little less functionality.

Makes things like data cleaning or integration easy.

Scheduling and running SISS jobs can be done in many ways, very flexible.

Negative. I would say source control is difficult, there’s no elegant solution.

We have delivered numerous projects to our clients using SSIS where the client has been very happy with the delivery of our solution.

The big struggle with SSIS is having multiple devs on a single SSIS package, this can create merge nightmares from a source control standpoint.

Overall SSIS is a good option for clients who have Microsoft enterprise licensing. It provides a good set of capabilities for RDBMS systems, but you will need more custom dev if you are ingesting emerging feeds such as JSON objects.

Quick and easy tool to bring disparate data together to make final harvest a 1 stop shop for data visualization

No need to pay elaborate hourly rates for Python scripts etc if you don't need to harvest data that way.

SQL Server Integration Services has had a positive impact on our organization as it has allowed us to integrate data from external data sources via CSV and flat files

SQL Server Integration Services has a waning positive impact on our organization as we are moving more toward Big Data and Oracle data

Given the initial investment in SQL Server Integration Services, the ROI has been positive as it has enabled business-critical ETL for the past 5 years

I use SSIS to automate tasks that I'm repeatedly asked to do. "Hey, can you go into the system and close any open orders that we've fully filled?" Sure....then I schedule a package to do that for me every hour so I'm never asked again. It saves me time, which gives value to the company.

It removes the risk of human error. When people build files and send them, there's the risk that it doesn't happen the same way every time or gets forgotten. With SSIS, you spend some up front time building a process, but then you deploy it and forget it (unless it emails you that there was an error. You are putting error handling in your ETL, right?). Very repeatable and consistent business solution.

As it is part of the SQL related products, customers are more receptive to the product due to the lower risk. This increased our product offerings in our solutions for projects.

The work required to implement an SSIS project is relatively quick compared to other tools and it reduces the amount of time required by staff to configure.

It wasn't used effectively, resulting in not realising ROI to the extent we had anticipated

It was easy to learn, which resulted in business teams using it extensively without IT support, resulting in lots of packages/code to maintain

Positive Impact: Faster Performance

Negative Impact: Script Task and Script component always hangs up

It comes with SQL server, so if you are already using that for the DB, we had no charge for using SSIS for the same solution. That is one big advantage of Microsoft, they provide the whole combo for BI at once.

ROI is a time measure, if you bought SQL just for the DB, but then you want to use SSIS, most probably it is already there.

If you try even an open source solution, you will have to install it and get trained on it, for SSIS the learning curve is very short.

Be careful, SSIS is for ETL, not for middleware at an enterprise level. In the begining it might work but it is not the purpose of the tool, for middleware solutions where the business depends on, don't get confused and if you are still looking for Microsoft go for BizTalk.

SSIS can have significant ROI by automating data flow processes and putting data integrity checks and transformations in place during the process. The reliability of the process increases and time is recouped because no end user is responsible.

Ability for non programmers to create and automate processes.

Investment in SS/SSIS was already done before I joined. But we could not operate without SSIS at this point. So much implementation has done within SSIS that migration would be next to impossible at this point.

Using SSIS has allowed us to free up a lot of time from our business users. We do a lot of predictive analytics here and we generate models/reports for various business units outside of our own. This involves ETL, running stored procedures, executing R scripts, and running other analytical tools over the data and generating data. By automating a lot of these tasks, these users are free to do more research and explore other opportunities for revenue/profit.

SSIS is a pretty popular tool and it is not difficult to hire users that have experience. We don't need to spend a lot of time training new associates no how to use the product which saves us a lot of resources.

Overall, we're able to achieve our business goals because it does what it's intended to do. We're able to integrate our tools and applications together to create new products and revenue streams.

SSIS comes with standard SQL Server implementations, so it does not cost extra to utilize. On the other hand, its inflexibility makes it inferior to some other leading ETL tools. Investments into tools other than SSIS must be weighed against the pricing model for shops already using SQL Server.

SSIS has allowed us to meet a complex variety of ETL needs without having to acquire a profound knowledge of application programming and the learning curve is really not bad considering the power available. We heavily depend on SSIS every day.

SSIS or SQL Server doesn't play nice with Sybase databases, and it takes some work to make ETL go smoothly between Sybase and SQL server databases, particularly since SQL Server Management Studio can't query certain Sybase formats.

It is included with SQL Server, so it is a very powerful tool included at no additional cost. It has saved us a lot of money over possible alternatives.

Faster implementations

Integrated reporting environments

Cost savings via automation

Comes free with SQL server so no additional license

Easy to learn and material is available for free, no need for expensive training

Data preparation is the majority of the effort involved in data warehousing projects. The amount of time it takes to prepare data is the same now as it was when the product was introduced in 2005. There are more features now, but the amount of time that you are spending with the tool has still remained the same.

SSIS is a very widely used tool, making talent easy to find.

Because its included with SQL Server, you don't have to go through any additional effort to purchase this tool. If you own SQL Sever then you already own SSIS.

SSIS is integrated into SQL Server licenses

Once developed your packages are very stable and it requires relatively little maintenance

If used wisely, it saves a lot of working time