We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, SSIS, and WhereScape RED based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows."
"If the systems get migrated or upgraded, the amount of resources required are very minimal. We can change the connections and establish a new connection. It's very helpful."
"To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions. Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use. Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle."
"It provides everything I need. Nothing is missing. PowerCenter is a good tool for on-premise databases."
"It provides monitoring and we can therefore be aware of what is happening when we are handling jobs."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager."
"The support is valuable. There are also open-source ETL products, which work very well, but there is no support. When we face a production problem, being able to get support is valuable, and it brings efficiency. With an open-source solution, we can't engage anyone to resolve the problem as quickly as possible."
"The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, say, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage."
"It is also easy to learn and user-friendly. Microsoft is also good in terms of technical support. They have built a large community all over the world."
"The most valuable feature of SSIS is that it can handle real complex transformations."
"The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward."
"I have used most of the standard SQL features, but the ones that stand out are the Data Flows and Bulk Import."
"The most valuable thing is that it is easy to connect with Microsoft tools. In Europe, particularly in France, a lot of companies use Excel, SQL Server, and other Microsoft tools, and it is easier to connect SSIS with Microsoft tools than other products."
"The initial setup was easy."
"The performance is better than doing it in some alternative ways. We don't have to worry about so much manual work."
"It's a competent product."
"RED generates comprehensive documentation and regenerates it as quickly as things changes, but it also provides impact documentation."
"WhereScape is really helpful in terms of architecture data. Everything is one of automation. Two people can do thousands of tables in one day or two. It saves a lot of time."
"I like the data vault implementations."
"Quickly develops a data warehouse for our organization with documentation and can track back/forward features."
"This is a fantastically robust DW tool that will make you at least 10 times faster in producing a DW."
"Data transformations and rollups are easy to accomplish."
"Their support staff are very knowledgeable, courteous, and professional. I feel their support staff go above and beyond to assure their customers are satisfied."
"The most valuable feature is the metadata generated code."
"PowerCenter has three clients. I wish they would consolidate everything into one GUI, not three. Also, we had a persistent issue with the Informatica Developer tool but it was solved when we migrated to the newest one."
"We had stability issues, mostly with JVM size."
"Its scalability can be improved. It is not scalable."
"What needs improvement in Informatica PowerCenter is the cloud experience because, nowadays, other companies, such as AWS, Azure, and Google, have more experience in the cloud. The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter on the cloud is also very expensive for customers, so some customers prefer open-source tools or lower-priced tools, such as Azure. From my point of view, Informatica must work on the pricing policy and review the policy on the cloud for Informatica PowerCenter or propose more tools with lower pricing. Clients want the automatic integration of Informatica PowerCenter with other tools. Currently, the integration process is manual, and you have to add other tools to facilitate the integration, especially with the DevOps methodology. You need scripts and tools for the integration, and you'll need to use other integration tools if you want automatic deployment for Informatica PowerCenter, so this is another area for improvement in the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for the integration with APIs to be simpler, because currently, the API integration feature of Informatica PowerCenter is very difficult. It's not intuitive. You have to facilitate API integration and the real-time streaming of messages in Kafka, for example, so that should be improved."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"PowerCenter could be improved by having more big data components. Normally, we prefer Informatica as a relational database, but nowadays, companies are trying to understand and use big data components. I think it would be useful if we had more chances to create a hub ecosystem because customers try to use some data integration tasks by SQL, Spark and Spark codes, and Scala, but at the end of the day, the company will understand that we need to trace all the steps. An ETL tool is a must for that company, if we're talking about the regulated industries like finance, telcos, etc. If Informatica's biggest ecosystems feature were okay, I would prefer to use it."
"Informatica, in my opinion, is very rigid and not very flexible, whereas platforms like Alteryx or Matillion are very flexible and agile."
"It would be nice to have all tools in one place. CDC needs more effort, as it's only easy to develop if you are familiar with Linux."
"SSIS should be made a little bit more intuitive and user-friendly because it needs an expert-level person to work on it."
"There were some issues when we tried to connect it to data storage. It was a connection issue."
"SSIS is cumbersome despite its drag-and-drop functionality. For example, let's say I have 50 tables with 30 columns. You need to set a data type for each column and table. That's around 1,500 objects. It gets unwieldy adding validation for every column. Previously, SSIS automatically detected the data type, but I think they removed this feature. It would automatically detect if it's an integer, primary key, or foreign key column. You had fewer problems building the model."
"Microsoft's technical support has decreased in quality over the last few years, becoming less responsive and tending to pass problems on instead of solving them."
"The solution could improve on integrating with other types of data sources."
"Video training would be a helpful addition."
"We'd like them to develop data exploration more."
"It hangs a lot of the time."
"The scheduled jobs which are run by the WhereScape scheduler seem to be a strangely separate animal. Unlike all other WhereScape objects, jobs cannot be added to WhereScape projects. Also, unlike all other objects, jobs also cannot be deleted using a WhereScape deployment application."
"Improve the object renaming ability (it works, but it could be more automated)."
"No support for change data capture or delta detection - that must be custom coded ."
"Technical support isn't the best."
"It could use a tool to diagnose what is missing from the environment for WhereScape to install successfully."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly on enterprise-level where people use it."
"Project-based searching of data objects in the data warehouse browser needs to be improved."
"The ability to execute SSIS projects within WhereScape would be nice because we have a lot of packages that are too cumbersome to recreate."
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