Item: Matillion
Rating: 6
Author: Dan Dow

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as our ETL tool across the entire organization including marketing, finance, customer service, and support. We pull data from our proprietary product use as well as Salesforce to merge data about our product use, customer service, employee time, billing and finance information, and process handling in our AWS cloud core.

Pros and Cons

Hides the SQL code
Creates an intuitive UI for data flows
Interfaces with many third-party platforms

Moving data through a flow can be very tedious.
Errors are often obtuse and hard to pinpoint.
They used to auto-complete typing table names, but they removed that, making point number one all that much worse.

Return on Investment

We have not had to hire a crew of SQL coders to create our analytics service.
We have a crew of people who are not coders that actually understand the data flows.
For the most part, our data delivery is reliable.
When it's not reliable, fixing it is very time-consuming because, for example, Matillion doesn't tell things like what record broke the flow.

Usability

It's easy to understand when everything works, but difficult to diagnose when it doesn't.

Time to Value

A couple of weeks were enough to get me comfortable. A couple of months were enough to make me feel like I understood it intuitively.

Scalability

The block is really how tedious it can be to publish a field through transformation to transformation from extract to publish.

Likelihood to Recommend

Matillion is really good at giving you a visual reference to look at data flows. The layout of orchestration and transformation jobs is intuitive enough that I have been able to show people who have never coded SQL in their lives how to use the product and they can understand how the data is moved and how it is transformed.

However, say you need to add a field to a top-level table that you have not written an extract for. Moving that new field across each transformation job for each intermediary fact or dim table can be very time-consuming and tedious and it seems it should not be that hard to add a feature--"populate through transformation as {field name}" should be possible.

Intuitive and saves money on coders, but tedious and time-consuming in places.

Overall Satisfaction with Matillion