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Upsert Component: Highly praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the Upsert component in Task Factory has been mentioned by several …
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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…
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Popular Features
- Complex transformations (35)9.696%
- Connect to traditional data sources (40)9.494%
- Simple transformations (39)8.787%
Pricing
Task 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
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.sentryone.com/products/task…
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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 Integrations
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Azure Machine Learning
- REST
SolarWinds Task Factory Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
SolarWinds Task Factory Downloadables
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(64)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Pros
- Cons
Upsert Component: Highly praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the Upsert component in Task Factory has been mentioned by several users as a valuable feature. Users appreciate that with just a few clicks, they can perform merge operations without the complexities of writing code.
Extended Functionality: Many users find Task Factory to be highly beneficial due to its ability to extend the functionality of native SSIS components. This aspect allows them to work with a wider range of data sources and perform tasks that would otherwise be challenging with only native components.
Seamless Integration: The seamless integration capabilities of Task Factory have been highlighted by users. They mention specific use cases such as integrating with partners' Secure FTP sites, working with Excel, and sending out emails using partners' SMTP servers. Users appreciate how Task Factory simplifies these tasks and saves them significant time.
Challenging execution against non-licensed servers: Some users have found it challenging to execute packages against servers that do not have proper licenses, which has required them to search for alternative solutions or workarounds.
Lack of detailed logging for errors: Users have expressed a strong desire for more comprehensive and detailed logging capabilities when components encounter errors. This would enable better troubleshooting and analysis of issues during package execution.
Lack of notifications for software updates: Several users have mentioned that they were not notified or alerted when new versions of the software became available. This lack of notification caused them to miss out on important updates and improvements to the product.
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Reviews
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
August 19, 2019
Task Factory made things possible
We are using Task Factory in our daily ETL processes. These processes are built and maintained by the Business Intelligence department
- The task to call another package in a different solution
- Advanced lookup and other tasks
- Improvement can be achieved when new releases are tested better. We had a few times that our ETL stopped when implementing a new release.
August 19, 2019
Task Factory Delivers!
Used for data ETL and interfacing between databases and packages.
- Data validation
- Data cleaning
- Quickly building interfaces between databases, non-database sources, and packages.
- Would like to see more detailed documentation and examples.
July 19, 2019
A complete package of additional tasks for SSIS
In our department, we use continuously and for several years Task Factory for the development of ETL through Micorosft Integration Services. I can assure you that it is absolutely an excellent product, without it the development of complex packages would certainly be longer, both in terms of time and in terms of effort in developing a lean and fast process.
- Great time gain in terms of development.
- Seamless integration with Integration Services.
- It has an excellent component for developing SCD tasks.
- It is an excellent program but it is obviously paid.
- The license must be renewed regularly if the product is to be updated.
- If you change visual studio version you need to update to the latest versions.
July 17, 2019
Better quality outcomes with less code cutting
Task Factory is used within our Business Systems team for the development of SSIS packages for ETLs into our data warehouse and other applications.
It speeds up development time by adding very useful transforms that are easier to use than the standard Microsoft transforms as well. It makes debugging and development faster.
It speeds up development time by adding very useful transforms that are easier to use than the standard Microsoft transforms as well. It makes debugging and development faster.
- Expression editor is by far better than that in standard SSRS.
- The SharePoint destination and source is much easier to use than standard SSRS.
- The slowly changing dimension transform is very easy to use and adds a level of capability that gives a better outcome.
- More worked examples in the help.
June 22, 2019
Task Factory is great day to day
We're using Task Factory in our data warehouse processes. It helps solve various data cleanup and data flow problems.
May 29, 2019
Solve the problem without coding
We mainly use Task Factory to connect to third-party data source via REST. We were looking for a third-party connector of SSIS for Google Analytics in 2018. After evaluating a couple of vendors, we purchased Task Factory. It is mainly used by the Business Reporting Analytics team for ETL purposes.
- Retrieve data from various REST sources
- Data cleansing
- Data importing
- Offer more options in UI for different configurations of REST sources
- More details in documents
- It appears that REST connectors do not work well with Okta in place.
May 28, 2019
Good for any non trivial SSIS project
Task Factory is used by IT and Research. It is used in the ETL process in the data warehouse, and also many aux SSIS projects that involve moving data from one source to another. It is also used in various migration and data restructuring projects.
- It provides some less common connectors such as SFTP.
- The PGP component is very easy to use as it support a cross platform encryption standard.
- The Upsert Destination is vastly superior than the build in ADO or OLE destination.
- The PGP task involves some hardcode parameter.
- The Surrogate key component does not fetch a new key automatically based on the current maximum key.
We purchased Task Factory for one purpose - to connect to our production and development Dynamics 365 CRM environments via SSIS to internal SQL Servers for SSRS reporting.
- Relatively easy to set up and use on a SQL Server.
- Works like other connections in SSIS packages.
- When Microsoft upgraded our Dynamics 365 install from version 8 to 9, we delayed the upgrade for several months. Once we moved our dev platform to version 9, Task Factory stopped working. After we pushed every delay we reasonably could in prod, Task Factory had still not been updated to work with version 9 of Dynamics 365. In the interim we tried another product that had already been updated in lockstep with Microsoft. The Task Factory folks seemed to indicate that they knew about the problems when we called, and sent us a hotfix eventually after two or three months. However, the delay convinced us to go to another product.
- Weird or incorrect metadata in Dynamics 365 caused problems with the SSIS job whenever field changes were made in Dynamics 365. While this might not be the fault of Task Factory per se, our replacement product doesn't have this issue.
April 20, 2019
Thumbs Up for Task Factory!
Task Factory was selected for two primary reasons. First and foremost, because of the extensive library of functions it makes available in SSIS to ease the SSIS programmer's job of importing and cleansing data. Second, because of the logging and notification features that it makes available which allow us to easily track the record counts of data we imported and easily notify us if there are issues with the execution of an SSIS process. Task Factory is used by our IT department, but we import data from 15-20 State agencies, so it indirectly affects many of our processes.
- Better data cleansing and validation functions than are available in basic SSIS.
- Better database insert and update functions than in SSIS.
- Ease of use of functions provided.
- Re-introduce the prior feature to allow a user to copy or move SSIS variables from one package or scope to another.
- Provide a better upgrade path from one version of the product to another higher version. Our upgrade from 2008 to 2016 was quite complex and it seemed as though we might have been the first such upgrade Pragmatic Works had encountered.
April 06, 2019
Stop banging your head against the wall and get the tools to blow through it! Get Task Factory!
We use several components in our daily process to import data into our data warehouse. It allowed us to easily import Sharepoint data and grab emailed Excel attachments to process. It made it easier to accept and parse JSON data.
- The ability to use the email source to play with individual messages in a mailbox is key. We get a lot of attachments that we download based on attachment extension and subject content to place them in network directories for further processing.
- The ability to pull from Sharepoint lists that easily was a game changer. We can allow our users to maintain content that we can then consume and push to our data warehouse.
- The REST source was easy to implement and utilize to pull data from vendor APIs.
- The documentation could use some polishing, though I have seen significant improvement now that SentryOne took over.
- Prebuilt templates or examples available for use to jumpstart development efforts.
March 21, 2017
Task Factory Review
Task Factory is implemented by our database development and BI teams for use in supporting ETL requests from all departments within the organization. Task Factory has streamlined the process of loading data from many disparate data sources including flat files, Excel, XML, other database and cloud platforms. What could take many hours to write in SQL or to derive in native Microsoft SSIS components now takes as little as a few minutes to implement with Task Factory.
- The single most beneficial component to Task Factory is the Upsert component. If you're familiar with writing MERGE statements in T-SQL, you'll appreciate the Upsert component. Drag the component into your Data Flow and a few clicks later you have a MERGE without the code complexities.
- Where some native SSIS components leave you wanting more, Task Factory extends on many of these components as well as support for data sources not native to SSIS components.
- The number of extra components that come in the Task Factory tool kit will expand your tool belt to do just about anything you need or want to accomplish in SSIS.
- Limited to only running on a licensed server or in BIDS. We have development servers that require licensing as well, but I've had to get creative to be able to execute packages against non-licensed servers.
- Wish the logging was more detailed when components error.
- Not alerted when a new version is available.