IBM® DataStage® is a data integration tool that helps users to design, develop and run jobs that move and transform data. At its core, the DataStage tool supports extract, transform and load (ETL) and extract, load and transform (ELT) patterns. A basic version of the software is available for on-premises deployment, and the cloud-based DataStage for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data offers automated integration capabilities in a hybrid or multicloud environment.
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SSIS
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.
Currently not using any of the Informatica tools, so, I don't have a real way of comparing the tools. But comparison against Microsoft SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) I'd say DataStage stacks favorably. DataStage is a powerful tool for ETL processes that integrates …
IBM DataStage performes bettere than SSIS in every aspect. IBM DataStage performes better than SAP Data Services in terms of variables and job orchestration flexibility. It is as strong as ODI, but less complex to implement. It allows to write SQL queries as dbt and Glue, but I …
DataStage offers better integration capabilities without the need to write code manually. It also has a native ETL engine whereas MSIS requires a SQL Server. It has better integration capabilities with data quality, data profiling and data governance tools. The main drawback of …
SSIS is a very basic, developer-oriented ETL tool and while it lacks many of the nice UX features of its competitors it is a powerful tool that comes as a part of SQL Server and, in the hands of experienced developers with domain knowledge, can meet most organizations' ETL …
DataStage is somewhat outdated for an ETL. I guess that's what makes it a bit lagged behind its competitors. It can be used for data processing, sure, but its performance seems to be lagging behind or quite slow given the server it is running from. I won’t depend on this application if it's handling a lot of mission-critical banking and business data.
Ideal if the company is already a Microsoft shop, so chances are that it is free with SQL Server. Also, good for moving data between on premise systems. Not ideal for moving data to the cloud. No functionality out of the box to work with REST APIs. Stable product but definitely not the future
Technical support is a key area IBM should improve for this product. Sometimes our case is assigned to a support engineer and he has no idea of the product or services.
Provide custom reports for datastage jobs and performance such as job history reports, warning messages or error messages.
Make it fully compatible with Oracle and users can direct use of Oracle ODBC drivers instead of Data Direct driver. Same for SQL server.
Connection managers for online data sources can be tricky to configure.
Performance tuning is an art form and trialing different data flow task options can be cumbersome. SSIS can do a better job of providing performance data including historical for monitoring.
Mapping destination using OLE DB command is difficult as destination columns are unnamed.
Excel or flat file connections are limited by version and type.
Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
Because it is robust, and it is being continuously improved. DS is one of the most used and recognized tools in the market. Large companies have implemented it in the first instance to develop their DW, but finding the advantages it has, they could use it for other types of projects such as migrations, application feeding, etc.
SSIS is a great tool for most ETL needs. It has the 90% (or more) use cases covered and even in many of the use cases where it is not ideal SSIS can be extended via a .NET language to do the job well in a supportable way for almost any performance workload.
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.
SQL Server Integration Services performance is dependent directly upon the resources provided to the system. In our environment, we allocated 6 nodes of 4 CPUs, 64GB each, running in parallel. Unfortunately, we had to ramp-up to such a robust environment to get the performance to where we needed it. Most of the reports are completed in a reasonable timeframe. However, in the case of slow running reports, it is often difficult if not impossible to cancel the report without killing the report instance or stopping the service.
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.
The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
With effective capabilities and easy to manipulate the features and easy to produce accurate data analytics and the Cloud services Automation, this IBM platform is more reliable and easy to document management. The features on this platform are equipped with excellent big data management and easy to provide accurate data analytics.
I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
It’s hard to say at this point, it delivers, but not quite as I expected. It takes a lot of resources to manage and sort this out (manpower, financial).
Definitely, I don’t have the exact numbers, but given the data it processes, it is A LOT. So props to the developer of this application.
Again, based on my experience, I’d choose other ETL apps if there is one that's more user-friendly.
