Astera Centerprise rules!
August 04, 2015
Astera Centerprise rules!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
6.x
Overall Satisfaction with Centerprise Data Integrator
Centerprise is primarily used to move data from our operational database into our newly created data warehouse. We also intend to use it to exchange data files between different applications. We are still in development, but we pull data from sources that span our whole organization into an enterprise data warehouse that will be accessed by our internal and external users through MicroStrategy, our reporting tool.
- It's incredibly easy to use. The YouTube videos Astera provides are enough to get you started. People with no previous ETL experience can start building simple mappings very quickly.
- It's incredibly easy to install and maintain. After I first installed Centerprise, I was able to start working in just a few minutes, and the maintenance releases are pretty straightforward.
- I am particularly impressed with how much Centerprise simplifies transformations that require more work in other ETL tools. The perfect example is the SCD transformation, which handles all the logic in an Slowly Changing Dimension. Even with a market leader like Informatica, the SCD logic has to be manually built. With Centerprise this can be built in just a few minutes, and it impacts every mapping.
- Performance is definitely an area to work on. My own benchmarking shows a notable difference when introducing simple transformations into a jobflow.
- The tool lacks debugging capabilities
- I would like to see more jobflow stats than the ones provided
- It is Windows-based. Many companies (including ours) are UNIX shops, and try to avoid Windows servers as much as possible, so it would be nice to have a non-Windows version.
- It's still too early to tell for us because this is a new data warehouse and reporting system, but I expect the difference will be like night and day.
- Today we face long waits and timeouts just to get some simple data out of our database. Centerprise will make those a thing of the past.
I have been a user of Informatica Power Center for 14 years, and I've always considered it the best ETL product available.
Centerprise is relatively new, and although it can't be compared to Informatica yet, I dare to say it offers a few things that even Informatica does not, like the SCD transformation, and overall, the ease of use.
I also evaluated open source tools such as Talend and Pentaho, but I realized you must have knowledge of JavaScript to even write some basic logic. While that is not an issue by itself, it makes it overwhelming compared to Centerprise's ease of use. The price was also very reasonable because the open source tools can get pricey once you want additional functionality or licenses.
Centerprise is relatively new, and although it can't be compared to Informatica yet, I dare to say it offers a few things that even Informatica does not, like the SCD transformation, and overall, the ease of use.
I also evaluated open source tools such as Talend and Pentaho, but I realized you must have knowledge of JavaScript to even write some basic logic. While that is not an issue by itself, it makes it overwhelming compared to Centerprise's ease of use. The price was also very reasonable because the open source tools can get pricey once you want additional functionality or licenses.