We performed a comparison between Databricks and Informatica PowerCenter based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: PeerSpot users consistently feel Databricks is a more complete solution, providing better integrations, features, and ease of use. The cloud-based architecture makes scaling seamless.
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"Databricks is hosted on the cloud. It is very easy to collaborate with other team members who are working on it. It is production-ready code, and scheduling the jobs is easy."
"The time travel feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Databricks provides a consistent interface for data engineers to work with data in a consistent language on a single integrated platform for ingesting, processing, and serving data to the end user."
"We can scale the product."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"Databricks makes it really easy to use a number of technologies to do data analysis. In terms of languages, we can use Scala, Python, and SQL. Databricks enables you to run very large queries, at a massive scale, within really good timeframes."
"Databricks' Lakehouse architecture has been most useful for us. The data governance has been absolutely efficient in between other kinds of solutions."
"Technical support, and their approach is good. They have a support portal and support tickets. If you open a ticket it has multiple levels of severity from level one to very high or critical."
"It is very comprehensive in terms of connector and transformation capabilities from both a source and target perspective."
"The most complex task, in this case, was to read and transform BLOB data, and Java transformation in Informatica Power Center was a great solution."
"Informatica PowerCenter is very good for integrating a huge amount of data in a very short duration, such as a minute. It is also very easy to use. After you provide the source and the target, mappings are automatically done, which makes it easy to use for the development team."
"Has a good visual tool for data mapping."
"What I like most about Informatica PowerCenter is that it's the best tool in the market for data integration. Currently, I work in L'Oréal, where a new system from SAP is used. Informatica PowerCenter integration with SAP is very, very fast and very, very simple, so you have the server flow from SAP, and through Informatica PowerCenter, you can ingest the data and make that data available for the business more quickly."
"The reliability of the product and the way of orchestration of different services is valuable to us."
"It works with any multi-databases, so it works with Sybase, SQL Server. Also, the performance is really good and it is easy to use."
"The product cannot be integrated with a popular coding IDE."
"The product could be improved by offering an expansion of their visualization capabilities, which currently assists in development in their notebook environment."
"The stability of the clusters or the instances of Databricks would be better if it was a much more stable environment. We've had issues with crashes."
"The product needs samples and templates to help invite users to see results and understand what the product can do."
"I would like it if Databricks made it easier to set up a project."
"It would be better if it were faster. It can be slow, and it can be super fast for big data. But for small data, sometimes there is a sub-second response, which can be considered slow. In the next release, I would like to have automatic creation of APIs because they don't have it at the moment, and I spend a lot of time building them."
"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."
"Databricks is not geared towards the end-user, but rather it is for data engineers or data scientists."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"I would like to see an improvement in the digital adoption."
"Unstructured data handling is an important area with a shortcoming that needs improvement in the solution."
"I would like to see improvements made to the custom transformations. It should be more open for users that want to write their own code and use cases."
"The pricing could be improved."
"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."
"I found it is kind of weird that not all of the mapping changes are treated as true changes."
"Compared to solutions offering similar functionalities, Informatica PowerCenter is not very flexible regarding customized integrations."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Informatica PowerCenter writes "Stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast, but its pricing is expensive". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Dataiku Data Science Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, Dremio and Azure Stream Analytics, whereas Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, AWS Glue and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI). See our Databricks vs. Informatica PowerCenter report.
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