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Matillion is an ETL tool that is... Easy To Learn!
April 29, 2019

Matillion is an ETL tool that is... Easy To Learn!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Matillion

We are currently using Matillion for scheduling, orchestrating and executing ETL jobs. This ETL process is critical to the company as the data being ingested is transformed to a clean and usable state, so that the data can be analysed and used for making data-driven business decisions.

We are also able to have a near real-time view of the data since we perform ETL on both stream and batch data.
  • Easy to orchestrate an ETL pipeline
  • Integration with Redshift and other AWS services provides convenience
  • Support team is easy to reach and have relatively quick response times
  • They also support the other 2 popular cloud data warehouses, Snowflake and BigQuery
  • Some components are available out to the box for easy integration
  • Task history is useful for debugging and monitoring current state of ETL pipelines
  • A GUI is provided for implementing complicated workflows, that can be easily followed
  • Since it's mainly GUI based, it becomes difficult for data engineers to compare changes between old and new versions of an ETL.
  • There are hard limitations for the number of concurrent users. This is part of the pricing model which is the reason.
  • Integration with GIT is not yet available but we heard that it would be coming in the near future.
  • Since we are a small team, we are able to quickly implement data pipelines in Matillion and this provides quick business value (or high ROI).
  • The trade off is that our process may neglect some additional code reviews due to the nature of the tool. This increases risk for bugs creeping into the ETLs which may be more expensive to fix later on.
Based on the key points outline so far, I like Matillion because of the ability to quickly orchestrate ETLs and easy integration with AWS and other online services. However, the lack of change comparison tool and code review is missing and this would be an extremely welcome addition, especially as I come from a software engineering background.
It's pretty quick to have it running since Matillion (for Redshift) provides pre-configured EC2 AMI instance via the marketplace. We were also able to emulate this by running Matillion for Snowflake from scratch. After that, the learning curve is relatively simple.
We think we are using it correctly and it scales sufficiently for us since we perform ELTs on the data warehouse cluster, instead of doing ETLs locally on the server.
I have used simple cron jobs, built and maintained a bespoke ETL tool. Other tools are always being evaluated such as Airflow and AWS step functions.
For a small team managing ETL pipelines, you can easily and quickly implement pipelines providing that:
  • the users are comfortable with SQL and running transformations on the
    data warehouse cluster, instead of the server. This it one of the
    selling points for Matillion - perform ELT instead of ETL
  • code compare (i.e. changes on ETL) can be done using the GUI rather than true source code diff
  • cron scheduling is sufficient and not reliant on triggers. Though it is possible to execute by trigger using their API
On the other hand, large teams that need to work concurrently and where code reviews is a critical process, then they may find it hard to adapt to Matillion.

Matillion Feature Ratings

8.0
Connect to traditional data sources
9
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
7
9.0
Simple transformations
10
Complex transformations
8
6.6
Data model creation
9
Metadata management
8
Business rules and workflow
10
Collaboration
3
Testing and debugging
3
3.0
Integration with data quality tools
3
Integration with MDM tools
3