We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), and Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."It's a very powerful tool you can use to load data, get data, do the drawing between the tables, and put into the packet in a very fast way."
"Informatica PowerCenter has been implementing mapping design, data flow, and workflow execution for years."
"It has a Data Catalog that uses the Model repository."
"The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, say, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage."
"The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the flow designer functionally. It is the best out of any ETL tool. Additionally, the solution is reliable and trustable in dealing with large data sources anytime. When we're using billions of data transactions, it's smooth."
"Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool."
"The most valuable feature is the new Data Lake feature, which provides the basic capabilities needed."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"It is an ETL tool, which does the extract, transform, and load."
"The product has an ELT approach."
"Easy to understand, very developer-friendly, and has a big forum community and lots of documentation for support."
"What I found most valuable in Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is that it integrates well with almost all technologies currently being used in my company."
"The most valuable feature that we use is the Knowledge Modules."
"It's scalable."
"It has the ability to easily load slowly changing dimensions."
"It's completely user-friendly."
"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."
"I can create faster instructions than writing with SQL or code. Also, I am able to do some background control of the data process with this tool. Therefore, I use it as an ELT tool. I have a station area where I can work with all the information that I have in my production databases, then I can work with the data that I created."
"This solution allows us to create pipelines using a minimal amount of custom coding."
"Flexible deployment, in any environment, is very important to us. That is the key reason why we ended up with these tools. Because we have a very highly secure environment, we must be able to install it in multiple environments on multiple different servers. The fact that we could use the same tool in all our environments, on-prem and in the cloud, was very important to us."
"Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool things is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing."
"The solution has a free to use community version."
"The fact that it's a low-code solution is valuable. It's good for more junior people who may not be as experienced with programming."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to use PL/SQL statements inside the data transformations and jobs."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve the data threshold for large sets of data. Additionally, they should add real-time integration."
"This solution needs the functionality to do batch processing of data. It also lacks connectivity to NoSQL, unstructured data sources."
"We had stability issues, mostly with JVM size."
"Integrating new tools can be tricky and challenging."
"While on-premises is a better product, we really need to move to the cloud and need the cloud to be as robust as this product."
"Unstructured data handling is an important area with a shortcoming that needs improvement in the solution."
"What I didn't like about it is that the platform itself is not great at distributed processing. When you need high parallel processing, it has some inherent issues. We had to use Java transformation, and it did not go very well. I have heard that it is going to the cloud, but we haven't tried that."
"Compared to solutions offering similar functionalities, Informatica PowerCenter is not very flexible regarding customized integrations."
"Reverse engineering is complicated and challenging to manage."
"I rate it a seven out of 10 because there is room for growth because ODI is still new, in comparison to Informatica, which is a mature product."
"At present, when multiple steps are executed in parallel in the load plan and errors occur, the error handling mechanism does not function correctly."
"There are certain things where it can be improved. Initial solution setup seems a bit complex at the start, it should be improved because it becomes bit tough for a novice to get started on this. Sometimes error description is not helpful to understand the problem it gives some generic type of errors which are at times not that helpful to understand the underlying root cause of the issue."
"ODI could improve by being more user-friendly. Informatica, which is also an ETL tool, similar to ODI, but Informatica is very user-friendly, easy to use, and simple to integrate, compared to ODI. ODI has many features, put them all together, and sometimes we get confused about which ones to use, which ones not to use."
"The performance of the user interface is in need of improvement."
"If you have something like Cisco on top of it, you will have endless problems."
"ODI could improve the ease of use. There is a steep learning curve to use the solution."
"I would like to see support for some additional cloud sources. It doesn't support Azure, for example. I was trying to do a PoC with Azure the other day but it seems they don't support it."
"I would like to see improvements made for real-time data processing."
"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."
"In terms of the flexibility to deploy in any environment, such as on-premise or in the cloud, we can do the cloud deployment only through virtual machines. We might also be able to work on different environments through Docker or Kubernetes, but we don't have an Azure app or an AWS app for easy deployment to the cloud. We can only do it through virtual machines, which is a problem, but we can manage it. We also work with Databricks because it works with Spark. We can work with clustered servers, and we can easily do the deployment in the cloud. With a right-click, we can deploy Databricks through the app on AWS or Azure cloud."
"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."
"As far as I remember, not all connectors worked very well. They can add more connectors and more drivers to the process to integrate with more flows."
"The reporting definitely needs improvement. There are a lot of general, basic features that it doesn't have. A simple feature you would expect a reporting tool to have is the ability to search the repository for a report. It doesn't even have that capability. That's been a feature that we've been asking for since the beginning and it hasn't been implemented yet."
"The web interface is rusty, and the biggest problem with Pentaho is debugging and troubleshooting. It isn't easy to build the pipeline incrementally. At least in our case, it's hard to find a way to execute step by step in the debugging mode."
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