Robust tool of working with data warehousing
December 23, 2021
It gives us best platform for connecting all data sources. Collection of data from our partners and clients gives us insights on how to …
SolarWinds Task Factory
SolarWinds Task Factory
Overview
Recent Reviews
Reviewer Sentiment
N/A
Positive ()
N/A
Negative ()
Awards
Popular Features
View all 5 featuresComplex transformations (36)
9.3
93%
Connect to traditional data sources (41)
9.0
90%
Simple transformations (40)
8.5
85%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
View all pros & cons
Holly Couch
Executive Administrator
Alliance Data Card Services (Financial Services, 5001-10,000 employees)Video Reviews
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Pricing
View all pricingTask Factory
1,245 (annual subscription license)
On Premise
per server
Task Factory Azure Data Factory
1,495 (annual subscription license)
On Premise
per ADF node
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.sentryone.com/products/task…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Features Scorecard
Data Source Connection
9.0
90%
Data Transformations
8.9
89%
Data Governance
9.4
94%
Product Details
What is SolarWinds Task Factory?
According to the vendor, SolarWinds Task Factory saves time managing tedious ELT/ETL tasks with high-performing SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) components that can be used within the Visual Studio environment to connect to nearly any data source. Task Factory’s components and tasks have been optimized to ensure fast performance of data-centric applications, and the user can run Task Factory on an Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime (IR) with Task Factory Azure Data Factory edition.
SolarWinds Task Factory Features
Data Source Connection Features
- Supported: Connect to traditional data sources
Data Transformations Features
- Supported: Simple transformations
- Supported: Complex transformations
Data Governance Features
- Supported: Integration with data quality tools
- Supported: Integration with MDM tools
SolarWinds Task Factory Screenshots
SolarWinds Task Factory Downloadables
SolarWinds Task Factory Integrations
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Salesforce.com
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM)
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Azure Machine Learning
- REST
SolarWinds Task Factory Competitors
- Microsoft SQL Server Native SSIS Components
- Codeplex
- Devart
SolarWinds Task Factory Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(66)
Reviews
(1-25 of 41)- Popular Filters
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December 23, 2021
Robust tool of working with data warehousing
It gives us best platform for connecting all data sources. Collection of data from our partners and clients gives us insights on how to manage our company better. When publishing our marketing campaigns it gets information and feedback from our clients comments. Our web designing team has been able to program most platforms without coding.
- Managing data warehousing.
- Integrating our servers to accelerate components.
- I have not experienced any challenge from the operation of this great tool.
- All the data tools function excellently.
It has enabled us to design most data working platform without coding. The SQL Server Integration Services have streamlined workflows giving us better control tools of daily tasks. It saves time since programming without coding is cheaper and does not have bulky programming techniques. The cost of creating the working system with SolarWinds Task Factory is lower as compared to other platforms.
September 08, 2021
Access High Performance SSIS with SolarWinds Task Factory
We use SolarWinds Task Factory across our team to manage data by connecting all sources in one integrated solution, including REST sources. Managing ETL and ELT tasks is less tedious with SolarWinds Task Factory.
- With Task Factory, it is easy to connect data from multiple sources such as SharePoint, Microsoft Excel, Facebook, etc.
- Extension of SSISS with zero coding has enabled us to save time while managing the data warehouse.
- Also, SolarWinds Task Factory makes it easy to automate metadata tasks in real-time.
- Pricing is way too expensive compared to other alternatives.
- Unavailability of existing mobile application.
With tons of prebuilt SQL SSIS available on SolarWinds Task Factory such as data flow, tasks, and control flows, it is easy to save time performing business procedures such as task management and metadata management.
September 06, 2021
SolarWinds Task Factory Review
It is used by our organization to optimize our data warehouse and streamline many tedious data warehouse management tasks. It also helped us to become cloud-ready and increase our productivity. Task Factory also helped to improve the performance of our data-centric applications and speed up our batch processing.
- Improve performance.
- Increase productivity.
Yes, it has provided this benefit and we have used it to accelerate our ETL process. We estimate it helped us to save around 10% of our time and we could use the time saved on our tasks and improve on the systems further. The performance is also faster and we do not need to wait too long.
September 06, 2021
Speeds up ETL development but concerned about future direction
It is being used across the organization. Task Factory makes it easy to achieve functionality that is not available within native SSIS. It saves a lot of coding time by making available out-of-the-box connectors and tasks that SSIS does not offer or has poor performance issues with. Speeds up time to market on ETL jobs.
- Merge (Insert/update) loads.
- SharePoint connectors.
- Row filters.
- It was built by Pragmatic Works who sold it to SentryOne and now Solar Winds, concerned about future support. SolarWinds is discontinuing support for related products such as BiXpress.
- Had issues with connecting to certain versions of SQL Server - would fail when deploying one package - had to deploy the entire solutions.
- Occasional random failures observed with the Filter tranform.
Not all tasks. For certain tasks, yes, it certainly is a time-saver and has probably saved 50%. Overall though, I would say it saves about 20-30%.
April 28, 2021
Task Factory makes me look great!
Task Factory is used to support our SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) needs. SSIS has many tasks built in but we have found they fall short of our needs and Task Factory fills that gap for us. The components provided are well designed and easy to configure for the package to use and allow parameters to be configured for ease of use across environments.
- The SFTP task is particularly helpful with proxy capabilities and setup with environment variables.
- The RestAPI task is something new that we have found helpful now.
- The latest UpSert task has also been a great addition.
- I thought it needed to improve the UpSert task to include delete capabilities but was informed it is present. Just might be useful to be more apparent to an infrequent user.
I am certain if I had been required to do things I do without Task Factory my work would have been far more complicated. We have had Task Factory since before I arrived, but I do see older packages that existed before this purchase and see easily how much more difficult things had been previously.
April 13, 2021
Task Factory and slowly changing dimensions
I use the tools mainly for the slowly changing dimensions as we load our warehouse.
- Slowly changing dimensions.
- Error logging during the process.
- Ease of setup.
- The ability to move records to different tables based on the data.
- None
It has been very helpful in the time savings aera where the slowly changing dimensions are concerned.
April 13, 2021
Task Factory Speeds Development
We have been using Task Factory to better standardize our ETL and to reduce the number of script tasks leveraged. It is primarily used for data flow and control flow tasks, although some connections are used as well. This is used as a standard, centralized tool within IT, along with other 3rd party SSIS tools.
- Email notifications.
- File management.
- User defined settings for external package calls.
- Better software update methodology.
Yes it has. I do not have a quantifiable amount of time savings, but it is considerable where script tasks were the only option previously available. We have been retiring off old script tasks, making maintenance/administration easier as well. This will also provide faster ramp-up for new developers as it is simpler to understand what the package components are doing as you do not have to interrogate the scripts.
April 30, 2020
Upgrade to Upsert
Our prima facie need was to increase the speed for loading our data warehouses. We used SSIS, and needed an easy way to convert to bulk updates and deletes. Task Factory offers several tools that reduce our load time by about 60 times. These are Upsert, Bulk Update and Bulk delete. We were already using the SSIS fast load, but had we had Task Factory earlier, it would have saved a huge amount of development. We have used a few of the other tools as well, but unfortunately, our addition of Task Factory was retrofit and not new development.
- Fast, large updates and deletes.
- Simple Upsert logic.
- Very nice integrated help, including video.
- Easy to install, well documented, and easy to use.
- Support was excellent under Pragmatic Works. I cannot attest to Sentry One.
- We had one case of an upgrade that would not work with existing code. They did release a next version very quickly.
Compared with major rewrites to force SQL and SSIS to do bulk updates, Task Factory saved us a few man-years. Our alternative likely would have been much more expensive hardware, if Task Factory were not available.
April 28, 2020
A Package for your Packages!
We use Task Factory within our team. We have a need to ensure efficient ETL design to drive our high-performing data-centric application. Task Factory helps us reduce development time spent programming custom SSIS tasks, gives us components and tasks that are optimized to perform well in production, and a broad array of connections to various data platforms.
- One-click Auditing Feature. Simply push a button, and all of your SSIS packages now have detailed auditing built-in, including the ability to watch it in real-time.
- Wide variety of connections. If you need to connect to a common data source, Task factory will have what you need. No need to roll your own anymore.
- The Upsert Component. Task Factory has a simple and FAST way to do an insert or update with new row data. It just works and works well.
- SCD component could be a little more intuitive.
- The help documents could be more detailed and current with what is actually released.
Yes, so much yes. Everything Task Factory does is about increasing productivity. It does this by taking the things you normally would have to create yourself or spend a lot of time setting up your self and just gives you something to work with right out of the box. Need to audit all of your packages? ONE BUTTON CLICK and all of your packages now have detailed auditing. That alone is worth many times the cost of the software.
April 28, 2020
Love Task Factory!
We are heavy SQL Server Integration Services shop. There are a number of instances where we were faced with hand-coding solutions that would take hours or days to implement, but with Task Factory we were able to do it in seconds. We have a large number of highly visible, customer-facing processes that depend on Task Factory, and it has been very reliable and easy to use.
- Our first use case was integrating with our Partners' Secure FTP Sites. Task Factory did this seamlessly.
- Our second use case involved Excel. We have multiple groups that use Excel to monitor their processes, and using the Excel refresh task made this very quick and simple.
- Our third use case was for SMTP. The basic SMTP did not give us enough control out of the box that we needed. We send out E-mails on behalf of our partners using their SMTP servers, so being able to change those connections effortlessly using this task was a huge time saver.
- Not sure. I have not run into an instance where their transform didn't provide what I needed more easily than other solutions.
Before we purchased Task Factory we had already spent about 2 man-weeks on different solutions that would almost work. Once we installed Task Factory we had the original need changed and implemented into production in under an hour. If we would have had Task Factory from the beginning, we would have saved thousands in development costs.
April 28, 2020
Task Factory: great for saving time !
Usage: We are using Task Factory inside the IT department to enhance the capabilities of SSIS (SQL Server Integration services).
Business problem: Your team can keep using SSIS and tackle data problems they could not resolve before (read from different sources without any code and do data upsert in one component).
Business problem: Your team can keep using SSIS and tackle data problems they could not resolve before (read from different sources without any code and do data upsert in one component).
- Read from APIs without code.
- Upset mechanism.
- Can be longer to debug.
- Need one license for dev servers.
One of our biggest projects was done using Task Factory. We had to extract data from an OData partner into our own databases. With Task Factory, we were able to complete these projects without using our Programmer team. We only used SSIS developers. That was huge for us because we were able to keep the programmers in other projects.
Task Factory is used by the BI and the Integration Department. It helps us to standardize the way we are extracting and transforming data into our data warehouse and also the way we are connecting different applications (CRM and ERP).
- The Slowly Changing Dimension Component saves us a huge amount if time compared to the native SSIS component.
- JSON Transform is really useful to convert record and send it to rest API.
- The advanced derived columns allow us to use really cool functions that are not available in the regular transforms.
- We were disappointed that the Marketto Connector has been retired from the components.
- We had a problem integrating Task Factory with LegiTest (license problem). It took a lot of time for Sentry to find and fix this problem
We replaced multiple native components like SCD, derived column, and lookup. TF allowed us to increase the speed of development and also improve execution time. The Lookup increased our lookup efficiency by 1000% because it avoids the reloading in a loop scenario.
March 25, 2020
Task Factory great for connecting to external sources
Task Factory is being used to integrate to a number of external organisations and data sources so it can be loaded into our organisations data warehouse. It helps make the integrations through SSIS very easy and simple using Task Factory's connectors. The main connector we are using it for is the Salesforce ones which are simple and effective.
- Easy to install.
- Easy to use.
- Great support if stuck.
- New connectors are not released very often.
- Updating the connectors is not an easy task.
- Troubleshooting a problem can be difficult.
Task Factory has saved the organisation a lot of time by extending the native SSIS components without any programming our side. This has led to increased productivity as well as being able to get our Warehouse up and running very quickly. The benefit has outweighed the cost of purchase and I would recommend it.
March 22, 2020
Task Factory Review
Our Data Integration team uses Task Factory as a 3rd-party plugin tool to support Microsoft SSIS packages. Task Factory makes our job simple in terms of connecting to "CRM", "SharePoint" or to pull data/files from a web service where we don't need to write a C# code to get this done. Also, it seems very effective when doing encryption and decryption techniques.
- Task Factory does a pretty good job in terms of connecting to any 3rd-party website/Web API/CRM and downloading/uploading files into them without using any program code.
- Task Factory makes it easier to encrypt/decrypt incoming/outgoing files.
- I believe they should improve the "address parser" feature where it simply parses the incoming address but didn't check/verify whether the incoming address is valid (or) checks whether the address has USPS address standard format.
Yes. Task Factory has helped our team to reduce the development time by 40%.
February 27, 2020
A tool every BI developer should have
Task Factory is being used by the IT BI department. It is part of our daily SSIS processes, for example, reads from XML or JSON sources, extracts from websites, compresses and decompresses zip files, handles data to be inserted or updated on tables, parses address information, sends email on different stages of the process.
Specifically, we can use it to download a zip file and decompress it and later use TF Upsert to update or insert zip code data into tables.
Specifically, we can use it to download a zip file and decompress it and later use TF Upsert to update or insert zip code data into tables.
- Upsert data on dimensions
- Read XML and JSON information from website
- Allow Upsert to just load bulk data
Reading and parsing XML and JSON are easy with Task Factory.
November 23, 2019
I would use Task Factory even if it cost more!
Task Factory is used in the IT department only. It addresses the need for data connections and transformations that are not included in the base SQL Server Integrations Services system.
- Tasks are more automated than having to create them by hand.
- Support is great either in forum settings or direct contact with support.
- Maybe ensuring that all assemblies are deleted when having to install Task Factory on the server.
Agreed. I would guess that 25% of my time has been saved.
November 19, 2019
Task Factory's Integration with Salesforce
We use it for linking our SQL DB to the Salesforce cloud connection for data integration and a variety of other data processing components.
- Easy to install, use and learn with basic SQL and SSIS knowledge.
- Wider component selection available for different use cases.
- I don't have any issues with the program.
It's saved the development of integration services and data manipulation time by more than 80%. Depending on which use case the system can be automated.
November 02, 2019
Good tool but needs to catch up to the competition
Used and implemented by my team , serving company needs . Connecting to REST API.
- Rest API
- FIle properties
- Secure FTP task
- Upsert
- Amazon Connectors
- S3 Connectors
- Red Shift Connectors
- Tableau Connectors
Sure, nothing to gauge here but has saved considerable time.
October 28, 2019
Salesforce just got easier due to Task Factory
Our Business and Application Reporting team is using this tool. We are using this to take the data from our Salesforce org into a data warehouse. Once the data is there we use it to create Microsoft Power BI reports. Also we use Task Factory to upsert data into Salesforce for any data migration projects. This has solved a numerous amount of issues regarding moving Salesforce data in and out of our data warehouse and other ETL.
- Upsert Salesforce data.
- It is simple to use.
- Very straightforward upgrade process.
- Continually getting new features that are useful.
- More drag and drop interfacing.
- Modernize the UI.
I concur that Task Factory has been designed to extend native SSIS components without programming in order to increase productivity and save time. This has saved our team a ton of time.
October 25, 2019
Task Factory Review
It was initially used to upload and download data from Salesforce. It was then used as part of our ETL to load data for Analysis Services models, both MOLAP and Tabular.
- Connect and access data in Salesforce
- Slowly changing dimensions task
- Error codes and descriptions
- I haven't used enough in recent months to suggest improvements.
October 09, 2019
Less coding for SSIS
Helps us send data securely to vendors.
- Email templates.
- Secure file transmissions.
- Rest API.
- Can’t think of any.
Yes, SFTP and rest API.
October 09, 2019
Helpful supplement to our SQL Server's base offerings
Purchased for Salesforce connectivity from our SQL Server platform. We have since leveraged other features such as Upsert.
It is used in support of our organization-wide data warehouse.
It is used in support of our organization-wide data warehouse.
- Upsert - simplifies coding.
- Facilitates an odbc connection to the Sales Force world without the complication of using APIs.
- Various other utilities to simplify ETL development.
- We have run into compatibility issues or low level problems between SQL server and Task Factory. Working with both SentryOne and Microsoft, they both ended up blaming each other and not offering a fix.
The Salesforce connectors have allowed my existing team to easily write integrations with Salesforce without having to learn or build coding skillsets for the use of APIs.
The Upsert framework avoids developers from having to redundantly code upsert-like functionality.
The Upsert framework avoids developers from having to redundantly code upsert-like functionality.
September 10, 2019
Task Factory saves vast amounts of time
The main reason we purchased Task Factory was to decrease the time to do Upserts into SQL Server and Oracle databases. Without it, developers would manually have to do lookups/inserts/updates in SSIS.
Although this was the main reason for the purchase, there are so many other components we use in SSIS like the termination task, the Sharepoint task, and the email task. Some of these tasks seem like "no brainers" that should be in SSIS by default!
Although this was the main reason for the purchase, there are so many other components we use in SSIS like the termination task, the Sharepoint task, and the email task. Some of these tasks seem like "no brainers" that should be in SSIS by default!
- Upserts to Oracle and SQL Server
- Email
- Secure FTP
- Cleaning up DB objects when Upserts fail
September 10, 2019
Task Factory Makes ETL Development Easier
My department's role is to support business intelligence reporting of ITIL process areas. We are currently using Task Factory to perform ETL processing and data warehouse processing. We utilize the email task to send our reports in pdf format, and we also rely on the data warehouse fact processing task and the dimension processing task as it makes processing much smoother and easier to manage.
- Advanced Email task makes it easier for an end-user to configure.
- Fact Load task makes the data flow much easier to manage than the OOTB lookup function in SSIS.
- Dimension Load task makes it easier to track multiple dimension types when loading into the DB.
- Would really like to see an SSRS generate PDF output with parameter input.
- Load improvement for larger datasets in the Upsert function.
- Consistency with expressions for every task.
Task Factory has definitely increased our productivity as I have mentioned before. Although there is a little bit of a learning curve with understanding how to use a task, once learned the amount of time saved is huge.
An example of this is when we were going to have to switch our data pulls from XML to SOAP/REST. Once we learned that there was a REST process within Task Factory and we were able to learn how to apply it, we saved a ton of time and increased productivity 5x what we would have had to do without it.
An example of this is when we were going to have to switch our data pulls from XML to SOAP/REST. Once we learned that there was a REST process within Task Factory and we were able to learn how to apply it, we saved a ton of time and increased productivity 5x what we would have had to do without it.
August 26, 2019
Streamlined data processes
I am testing Task Factory features and functionality to determine if it's a good fit for our organization. It is currently not widely implemented across the business, but there is potential for it if the POC proves viable. I am primarily looking at Task Factory to replace cumbersome, manual API calls and to streamline data flow from 3rd parties into our internal data warehouses.
- Good SSIS integration with other packages and processes.
- Easy to configure 3rd party account logins, credentials, etc.
- Intuitive interfaces.
- The user-experience could be a little more intuitive. Struggled a bit to put all the pieces together the right way in order to get the data processed the way I needed.
The need for programming is definitely diminished while using Task Factory. While the need for programming knowledge and expertise is not completely eliminated, it is certainly reduced such that wider adoption of SSIS components along with Task Factory can be easily achieved. All in all Task Factory will likely save 2-3 man-hours per week simply in its ability to automate tasks that previously required manual updating.