Wonderful idea, delivered well, but with average ecosystem.
March 31, 2022
Wonderful idea, delivered well, but with average ecosystem.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Data Virtualization
We use it for unifying access to various systems distributed across the company, along with simplifying authentication to several "kerberized" data sources. Also, we have a row-level security filtering applied in TDV due to a few underlying data source systems not supporting RLS. As for business problems, we actually do not address any (yet), we address only technical ones.
- Data throughput.
- Multitude of connectivity options to published datasources (JDBC, ODBC, REST, SOAP...).
- Performance of TDV Studio (its own IDE) is poor.
- Performance of TDV repository database is rather poor for larger numbers of objects .(Note: We have approx. 9tsd objects introspected in TDV and approx. 20tsd objects generated in upper DV layers.)
- Propagation of privileges to parent/child dependencies does not work when applying recursively on a folder. (It's a huge setback when working with large number of objects organized semantically into subfolders.)
- Lack of command line client interface for scripting at the time of version 8.4 (I had to write my own CLI.)
- TDV Studio does an absolutely horrible job with its own code editors when indentation is in place. Also, the editor is brutally slow and feature-poor.
- Tracking privileges on the level of table/view columns causes occasional problems when regranting.
- TDV's stored programs ("SQL scripts" in their own terminology) compiler leaves out many syntactic and semantic checks, making them hugely prone to run-time errors.
- TDV Server's REST API is a very poor (in terms of features) and flawed cousin to its SOAP API (at the time of version 8.4).
I was not part of product evaluation team, don't know what led my company to choosing TibcoDV in particular.
We did not solve any business problems (yet), we solved technical problems with authentication, authorization and connectivity as such to several data providing systems across our organization.
Do you think TIBCO Data Virtualization delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with TIBCO Data Virtualization's feature set?
No
Did TIBCO Data Virtualization live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of TIBCO Data Virtualization go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy TIBCO Data Virtualization again?
No
Using TIBCO Data Virtualization
50 - Different. Some are business people interested in accessing data, some are local IT vendors making use of data provided by TDV in their own IT systems, one (myself) is the former Oracle-DB-specialist-turned-TibcoDV-generalist who makes this all work.
1 - One full-time developer (me), one architect and one sysadmin. The latter two have nearly 0% allocation for the DV project.
- Unifying authentication and authorization.
- Simplifying access to multiple data providing systems.
- I myself learned fundamentals of C# and .NET Core to code around the lack of Tibco's own CLI. That sounds pretty innovative to me.
TIBCO Data Virtualization Implementation
- Implemented in-house
- Lack of CLI for scripting.
- Insufficient/incomplete support for mass granting/revoking of privileges.
- Bad support for mass assignment/unassigment of RLS policies.
- TDV Server's REST API is just a poor cousin to its SOAP API.
- TDV Studio is a rather bad IDE for writing code.
Using TIBCO Data Virtualization
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Relatively simple Well integrated Feel confident using Familiar | Difficult to use Inconsistent Slow to learn Cumbersome |
- Introspection. It has to be run several times in a row to account for errors from the previous introspections.
- IDE and its SQL editing features in particular are horrible.
- Lack of good CLI for scripting.