We performed a comparison between Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and SAP Data Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I can use Python, which is open-source, and I can run other scripts, including Linux scripts. It's user-friendly for running any object-based language. That's a very important feature because we live in a world of open-source."
"The fact that it enables us to leverage metadata to automate data pipeline templates and reuse them is definitely one of the features that we like the best. The metadata injection is helpful because it reduces the need to create and maintain additional ETLs. If we didn't have that feature, we would have lots of duplicated ETLs that we would have to create and maintain. The data pipeline templates have definitely been helpful when looking at productivity and costs."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to create many API integrations. I'm always working with advertising agents and using Facebook and Instagram to do campaigns. We use Pentaho to get the results from these campaigns and to create dashboards to analyze the results."
"It makes it pretty simple to do some fairly complicated things. Both I and some of our other BI developers have made stabs at using, for example, SQL Server Integration Services, and we found them a little bit frustrating compared to Data Integration. So, its ease of use is right up there."
"It has a really friendly user interface, which is its main feature. The process of automating or combining SQL code with some databases and doing the automation is great and really convenient."
"The graphical nature of the development interface is most useful because we've got people with quite mixed skills in the team. We've got some very junior, apprentice-level people, and we've got support analysts who don't have an IT background. It allows us to have quite complicated data flows and embed logic in them. Rather than having to troll through lines and lines of code and try and work out what it's doing, you get a visual representation, which makes it quite easy for people with mixed skills to support and maintain the product. That's one side of it."
"I absolutely love Hitachi. I'm one of the forefront supporters of Hitachi for my firm. It's so easy to integrate within our environments. In terms of being able to quickly build ETL jobs, transform, and then automate them, it's really easy to integrate throughout for data analytics."
"We also haven't had to create any custom Java code. Almost everywhere it's SQL, so it's done in the pipeline and the configuration. That means you can offload the work to people who, while they are not less experienced, are less technical when it comes to logic."
"The logic is also simple. It makes it easy to build your extraction."
"Data Services' table comparison mechanism is very powerful. It's pretty hard to find a similar feature in other solutions."
"It's easy to understand and deploy. It's easy to create new applications, and depending on the complexity of the application, it is easy to deploy the new requirements."
"It is a powerful product with a broad range of features."
"The API tool in this product is very valuable; it is very easy to onboard and use."
"We can extract data at a table level, extract data at the ETL level, and we can extract data at an ODP level."
"The solution offers very good integration capabilities."
"You can always manipulate a lot of things as long as you have the skill level."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up. There was a zone and, under it, another zone, and under that another one, and under that another one. There were a lot of levels and places inside the report, and it was a little bit complicated. You have to search all these different places using a mouse, clicking everywhere... each report is coded in a binary file... You cannot search with a text search tool..."
"I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse."
"I'm still in the very recent stage concerning Pentaho Data Integration, but it can't really handle what I describe as "extreme data processing" i.e. when there is a huge amount of data to process. That is one area where Pentaho is still lacking."
"The product needs more plugins."
"Lumada could have more native connectors with other vendors, such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft OneDrive, Jira systems, and Facebook or Instagram. We would like to gather data from modern platforms using Lumada, which is a better approach. As a comparison, if you open Power BI to retrieve data, then you can get data from many vendors with cloud-native connectors, such as Azure, AWS, Google BigQuery, and Athena Redshift. Lumada should have more native connectors to help us and facilitate our job in gathering information from these new modern infrastructures and tools."
"I work with different databases. I would like to work with more connectors to new databases, e.g., DynamoDB and MariaDB, and new cloud solutions, e.g., AWS, Azure, and GCP. If they had these connectors, that would be great. They could improve by building new connectors. If you have native connections to different databases, then you can make instructions more efficient and in a more natural way. You don't have to write any scripts to use that connector."
"Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying."
"The testing and quality could really improve. Every time that there is a major release, we are very nervous about what is going to get broken. We have had a lot of experience with that, as even the latest one was broken. Some basic things get broken. That doesn't look good for Hitachi at all. If there is one place I would advise them to spend some money and do some effort, it is with the quality. It is not that hard to start putting in some unit tests so basic things don't get broken when they do a new release. That just looks horrible, especially for an organization like Hitachi."
"We would like the different tools offered within this solution to be available as standalone entities, rather than having to purchase the entire package when we only require a few features."
"Scheduling of jobs in the sequence is not available. It's a very tedious process to do that particular task. If there was a tool to schedule in the sequence that would be extremely helpful."
"At the integration level, there could be certain set of improvement to connect to various other systems."
"The solution should offer more machine learning and automation."
"Newer feature integration is lagging behind the company acquisitions and the product could do more to service a broader range of devices."
"The execution engines and processing engines have shortcomings and need improvements."
"They could make it easier to work with web services."
"The description of error messages isn't extensive, although they point to the problem. With other solutions, like Talend, I was able to use the debugger to get directly to the problem, but with SAP Data Services the debugger is not working. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the version specifically, but I'm using it in an enterprise environment and I can't do an upgrade."
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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is ranked 15th in Data Integration with 48 reviews while SAP Data Services is ranked 10th in Data Integration with 45 reviews. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is rated 8.0, while SAP Data Services is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics writes "It's flexible and can do almost anything I want it to do". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP Data Services writes "Responsive support, scalable, and beneficial integration". Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is most compared with SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Talend Open Studio, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle GoldenGate, whereas SAP Data Services is most compared with Azure Data Factory, Syniti Data Quality, Informatica PowerCenter, SAP Process Orchestration and Palantir Foundry. See our Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. SAP Data Services report.
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