Data/Solution Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Apr 22, 2021
As a data integration platform, it is easy to use. It is quite robust and useful for volumetric analysis when you have huge volumes of data. We have tested it for up to ten million rows, and it is robust enough to process ten million rows internally with its parallel processing.
Its error logging mechanism is far simpler and easier to understand than other data integration tools.
The newer version of InfoSphere has the data catalog and IDC lineage. They are helpful in the easy traceability of columns and tables.
The best feature of IBM InfoSphere DataStage for me was that it was very much user-friendly. The solution didn't require that much raw coding because most of its features were drag and drop, plus it had a large number of functionalities.
Compared to other ETL tools, DataStage has excellent debugging and development capabilities. And the availability of connectors, even though we sometimes have to opt for specific ones. Also, the availability of patches is good.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jul 31, 2019
DataStage works better with Linux operating systems when the application services are hosted on Linux system equipment, but it's powerful on Windows too.
DataStage at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Mar 5, 2021
We are mostly using transmission rules. It has a lot of functions and logic related to transmission. It is a user-friendly tool with in-built functions.
In IBM DataStage, the Transformer is the most valuable feature for me. It enables me to apply complex transformations, generate the gateway key, and map source tables into the session table.
We would be happy to see in next versions the ability to return several parameters from jobs. Now, jobs can return just one parameter. If they could return several parameters, that would be great.
Data/Solution Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Apr 22, 2021
Its documentation is not up to the mark. While building APIs, we had a lot of problems trying to get around it because it is not very user-friendly. We tried to get hold of API documentation, but the documentation is not very well thought out. It should be more structured and elaborate.
In terms of additional features, I would like to see good reporting on performance and performance-tuning recommendations that can be based on AI. I would also like to see better data profiling information being reported on InfoSphere.
What needs improvement in IBM InfoSphere DataStage is its pricing. The pricing for the solution is higher than its competitors, so a lot of the clients my company has worked with prefer other tools over IBM InfoSphere DataStage because of the high price tag.
Another area for improvement in the solution stems from a lot of new types of databases, for example, databases in the cloud and big data have become available, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage is working on various connectors for different data sources, but that still isn't up-to-date, meaning that some connectors are missing for modern data sources.
The latest version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage also has a complex architecture, so my team faced frequent outages and that should be improved as well.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jul 31, 2019
I really like this tool, but the administration should be on the same client application because a lot of administration features are not on the client-side, and they usually need to have administrative access. It's quite complicated to force IT teams to have separate administrative access from the developers.
DataStage at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Mar 5, 2021
It doesn't have any big data connections. It would be good to have them because most of the systems are moving towards big data. There should also be a user-friendly way to interact with the cloud.
Its loading process is very slow. It takes a lot of time for around 5 or 6 million records, and we are not able to provide real-time data to the vendors due to this delay. Its performance needs to be improved.
It is also like a legacy system. It is not updated much. In higher versions, they only do small changes. We would like to have new features and new technologies.
Arquitecto Industrial IoT at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Feb 21, 2024
Improvements for DataStage could include better integration with modern data sources like cloud solutions and documents, along with enhancing its capability to handle non-structured data.
So, there are some features that are missing. If I compare DataStage to Talend, Talend allows you to write custom code in Java or use these tools in your applications as well if you are building a job application. But in DataStage, it does not allow you to write custom code for any component.
