Item: Matillion
Rating: 10
Author: Patrick Hildreth

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using Matillion as our primary ETL/ELT tool both in our department and supporting others in the organization as well as introducing it to other Business units under the Cimpress brand. For us and others it primarily solves the need of loading and manipulating raw data from multiple sources and making it available in both Redshift and Snowflake. Additionally, the flexibility of the tool and its seamless integration with the complete AWS Services library allows us to perform many operational tasks that are completely unrelated to the ETL/ELT workload.

Pros and Cons

Integrates very well with most, if not, all AWS services - Easy to get data from anywhere inside your AWS account into Redshift or Snowflake databases.
It has many available integrations and datasource connectivity outside of AWS and other cloud service providers - Makes it easy to get data from many sources and systems in more traditional on or off premise technologies as well as vendor-specific data and application interfaces.
Very intuitive, easy-to-learn-and-use interface with a large collection online tutorial articles and videos - makes for an extremely easy onboarding of users who may or may not have past experience with other similar tools.

Limited selection of instance sizes - Larger organizations and groups my need to set up multilple instances depending on estimations on concurrent users.
Lack of complete github, gitlab, or other source control integration - it has internal versioning but it is limited. Manual job exports currently don't lend well for useful DIFFs comparison when using those technologies.
Needs more options for authentication and security - User creation is very manual and can be tedious and difficult to manage for larger installations.

Return on Investment

Reliable source for ETL/ELT

Usability

It has a very intuitive workspace and organization of components. The job/task components are very easy to configure and not overly complex like some other ETL tools. The task history and error logging makes it very easy to troubleshoot job failures.

Time to Value

I was able to get my very first proof-of-concept instance up and running in under 10 minutes and get started building and executing my first basic ETL job in the Redshift product right away. And within about an hour, I had a basic prototype version of an SQL Server Integration Services(SSIS) job converted to run in Matillion for Redshift that was loading flat files from a Windows file share directly into our Redshift cluster via AWS S3.

Scalability

The product scales great for small to medium size teams or groups. For groups larger it becomes more challenging and requires more individual instances depending on the volume of running jobs and concurrent users - it handles 10's of concurrent users and jobs very well but much larger than that would be extremely difficult on the largest instance or cluster that is available at this time.

Alternatives Considered

Fivetran

When we started there were not many options and the ones that were did not have the same level of functionality.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is very easy to set up and get working on right away, anyone with access to an AWS account and the Marketplace can have a fully capable ETL server up and running in under 10 minutes and the 14-day free period allows an adequate amount of time to decide whether the tools works for your use-case. It has a direct hourly billing option that bills through your monthly AWS bill and the option to pay-as-you-go or pay up front and reserve an instance at nicely discounted rate. Overall it's the usability, flexibility, and capability that made Matillion the choice for me.

Matillion is a powerful and easy-to-use, completely cloud-capable ETL/ELT solution.

Overall Satisfaction with Matillion