IBM DataStage vs. Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)

Excellent Cloud data mapping tool and easy creating multiple project data analytics in real-time and the report distribution are excellent via this IBM product. Easy tool to provide data visualization and the integration is effective and helpful to migrating huge amounts of data across other platforms and different websites insights gathering.

Incentivized

Informatica Powercenter is the centerpiece of our overall enterprise data warehouse strategy. It's a critical enablement to ensure we can feed in multiple data stream and transform them into digestible data within our data warehouse. With its flexible capabilities and API availability, we were able to feed in industry standard data format as well as home grown data structure. Overall, we are very pleased with their capability and contribution to our data warehouse strategy.

Incentivized

• Very reliable in handling data extraction, data transformation and loading
• Flexibility in connecting to different type of databases, relational or non-relational
• Great features such as parallel processing, hash handling, etc.
• You can also take advantage of its FTP functions, and scheduling features if you need to.

Incentivized

• Informatica has a wide range of support for databases. Pretty much every mainstream DBMS is compatible here.
• Designing ETL mappings and workflows is a very intuitive process, and takes minimal learning time and effort even for a beginner.
• Informatica's biggest strength is its sheer performance. It is unmatched in terms of handling large volumes of data.

Incentivized

• You must understand and know the algorithms, since the wrong use of them generates more time in processing.
• Metadata. You need to develop with connectors, and taking all the Metadata from the menu, all the data that you complete manually, you can't track it.

Incentivized

• One of the challenges of PowerCenter is the lack of integration between the components and functionality provided by PowerCenter. PowerCenter consists of multiple components such has the repository service, integration service, metadata service. Considerable time and resources were required to install and configure these components before PowerCenter was available for use.
• In order to connect to various data sources such as Netezza database or SAS datasets, PowerCenter requires the installation and configuration of separate plug-ins. We spent considerable time trouble-shooting and debugging problems while trying to get the various plug-ins integrated with PowerCenter and get them up and running as described in the documentation.
• PowerCenter works well with structured data. That is, it is easy to work with input and output data that is pre-defined, fixed, and unchanging. It is much more difficult to work with dynamic data in which new fields are added or removed ad-hoc or if data format changes during the data ingest process. We have not been as successful in using PowerCenter for dynamic data.
• One of the challenges of learning PowerCenter is that it is difficult to find documentation or publications that help you learn the various details about PowerCenter software. Unlike SAS Institute, Informatica does not publish books about PowerCenter. The documentation available with PowerCenter is sparse; we have learned many aspects of this technology through trial and error.

Incentivized

Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.

Because it is a flexible tool that can manage many flows and create a strong solution with a interesting use of variables. Easy to scale up as you can copy jobs arleady build and modify them. SQL queries allow to be fast in development and have the pushdown feature, but you loose a little of user friendly look. Metadata management is not strong as a visual feature, but can be determine by job codes.

Incentivized

The tool is very flexible and will meet most, if not all, of your data transformation needs. It is an expert-level tool, so building your knowledge-base and user-base (and keeping that base healthy!) is very important. But it will pay off with strong data management and the ability to leverage that data in ways you haven’t thought of yet. Bottom line, data is money, and PowerCenter helps you monetize your data.

Incentivized

It could load thousands of records in seconds. But in the Parallel version, you need to understand how to particionate the data. If you use the algorithms erroneously, or the functionalities that it gives for the parsing of data, the performance can fall drastically, even with few records. It is necessary to have people with experience to be able to determine which algorithm to use and understand why.

Incentivized

Positives; - Multi-user development environment. - The speed of transformation. - Seamless integration with other Informatica products. Negatives; - There should be fewer windows, to maintain developers' focus while using. You probably need two big monitors when you start development with Informatica Power Center. - Oracle Analytical functions should be natively used. - E-LT support as well as ETL support.

Incentivized

IBM offers different levels of support but in my experience being and IBM shop helps to get direct support from more knowledgeable technicians from IBM. Not sure on the cost of having this kind of support, but I know there's also general support and community blogs and websites on the Internet make it easy to troubleshoot issues whenever there's need for that.

Incentivized

Informatica power center is a leader of the pack of ETL tools and has some great abilities that make it stand out from other ETL tools. It has been a great partner to its clients over a long time so it's definitely dependable. With all the great things about Informatica, it has a bit of tech burden that should be addressed to make it more nimble, reduce the learning curve for new developers, provide better connectivity with visualization tools.

Incentivized

No, it wasn’t my decision to use such an ETL product. I’m just the administrator at this point. I’ve heard there are other products there that are even on cloud support. That is much easier to use, more agile, and user-friendly. That doesn’t have that barrier from user to administrator to the developer standpoint.

Basically the two solutions have, more or less, the same functions and features.The difference, for me, is that ThreatQuotient make more features over the security and I think is oriented to a SOC enviroments. InformaticaExchange Connectors is oriented to the quality, integration and distribution of the data in order to ensure the reliability and access of data from different sources, as well as the integration in a single repository of enterprise data (External/internal)

Incentivized

• Not directly related to ROI or cost figures. Only comment here is that IBM tools tend to be more costly than average ETL tools, but it depends on if the company is an IBM shop.
• One positive aspect is the company has had not a need to switch ETL tool for years.
• Upgrading to newer versions of the tool brings flexibility in the tool and up-to-date features in relation to other applications.

Incentivized

• PowerCenter has been instrumental in being the center of all data movement within the organization.
• It has also provided a foundation for which re-usability and scalability are the focus.
• Finding talent with experience and expertise in PowerCenter is far more likely due to its presence and market share.

Incentivized