SSIS

If you use any of the Microsoft tools, it is easy to get using and understand since it uses Visual Studio and SSMS to work with. There are extensions you can get and some of those can be difficult to work with but usually they slide in nicely. The one thing to understand though is there is some installation and configuration on the SQL Server side that can take some time.

While there is a learning curve, it is possible to successfully implement SSIS in anyone's business with little or no prior experience. The tool's native usability along with a wealth of online resources in a large community means that the user will never be stuck for long.

In my opinion, this tool should be an IT department’s main tool for integrating and cleaning data for the business. It’s so simple to use and so simple to learn so there is no excuse.

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.

SSIS has a drag and drop based developer interface, so it is relatively straight forward to get started. You can start to get into the weeds pretty quickly as your solution becomes more complex. However, most of the base functions are right in front of you for a developer. You can also set project and solution level parameters, so when you deploy to new environments, you don't have to jump into each package to change your variables and settings. (For example, default directory to ingest flat files).

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.

Easy to use, however there are functionality limits