SSIS Valuable Features

BobAmy - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Architect - Data warehousing & BI at Molina Healthcare, Inc.

Data Flows are the main component we use. These can range from a simple source to sink ETL, to many source to many sink dataflows.

For flexibility and to make reading the logs in case of errors, I prefer not to put multiple copy operations in the same dataflow, although that is possible.  I try to keep in mind how to make production operations as easy as possible in case of failures.  I want to give the night crew the best opportunity for success when an error does occur.

We have about one error per 400 processes. About 3/4 of these were transitory issues with issues like slow connections and temporary outages. By making the code rerunnable, we can auto-restart on any error, and that resolves 3/4 without human intervention. This leaves any failure after two retries the only issue that the night crew has to do Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on.

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Sakiru Dosumu - PeerSpot reviewer
Head, Development Chapter (DevOps) at First Bank of Nigeria Ltd.

he ability of SSIS to transform and transport data is extremely valuable to me. It allows for intelligent extraction and manipulation of data during the process. Improved error handling would enhance ETL processes further. I haven't directly utilized the data flow components but they seem capable of supporting complex data integration needs.
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Rohit Rastogi - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Data Engineer at Capgemini

Many features are very good in SSIS. 

I can create a particular package, and I don't need to repeat it again and again. For example, I can create a package that will fetch all the data from the given data. If my client gives me some data, I can clean some data, perform some transformations, and then store the data in any place. That's quite helpful for me as well. I don't have to do it again and again manually. I just have to create a package, schedule it, and it could be run, and it could be stored in any target I have. It can run for me, again and again, without me having to re-make it manually again and again.

It is easy to set up the product.

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Buyer's Guide
SSIS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SSIS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Krishna_Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Solutions Specialist at Kuwait Oil Company (K.S.C.)

We like that this solution includes a developer edition, free of charge, to allow for training.

This solution is a free, additional feature with an SQL database license, which we appreciate.

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Arpita-Mishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Specialist Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This tool works well when users aren't working with large amounts of data. 

It is easy to set up the solution. 

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Eyal Golombek - PeerSpot reviewer
Database administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 51-200 employees

The performance is better than doing it in some alternative ways. We don't have to worry about so much manual work. 

Mostly it was helping us with importing XML files by checking the access and then doing some look-ups and containers to implement loops and things like that mostly. That was quite helpful in terms of saving time. 

Technical support is helpful.

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Business Intelligence Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

In my experience with SSIS, I have found its most valuable features to be its package management capabilities and the flexibility it offers in designing workflows. We often use templates, inheriting and embedding scales in SSAS to streamline our processes.

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Mylsamy T. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate - IT at Himalaya Wellness Company

Overall, it's a good product. I haven't had any issues with the product.

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Sakiru Dosumu - PeerSpot reviewer
Head, Development Chapter (DevOps) at First Bank of Nigeria Ltd.

The most valuable feature of SSIS is its ease of use. It is easier to use than other applications.

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Ullas Soman - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Consultant at Coforge Growth Agency

It allows us to use our own logic. We can create our own packages where it can help us to define the business logic.

It is easy to set up. The deployment is also very quick.

It is stable and reliable. 

The product is scalable. 

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Syed Fahad Anwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Developer at HHRC

SSIS provides you with lookup and transformation functions, and you have the flexibility to write your own custom code.

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DM
Data Architect at AMP Capital

SSIS is an easy way to do data integration from various data sources. It doesn't matter whether it's a database, flat files, XML, or Web API. It can talk to the and join them all together.

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VS
Senior Associate at PwC Acceleration Centers

The most valuable features of SSIS are that it works with the query language and it can import data from different sources. 

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Pavel Adam - PeerSpot reviewer
BI specialist at SKODA AUTO a.s.

The most important features are it works well and provides self-service BI.

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SR
IT Manager at European University

It is the most valuable for staff processes in order to gain efficiency. It allows us to get the data normalized easily.

The solution is stable.

It can scale well.

The deployment process is very easy and quite quick.

They have good documentation. 

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MB
Sr. Training Manager with 201-500 employees

It's something I needed for bulk imports. I'm not a big fan of it, but I haven't seen anything better.

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AS
General Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

SSIS' best feature is SFTP connectivity.

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LD
IT Project Management /Research & Development Team Leader at Ethiopian Roads Administration

The performance is good.

It's easy to use. 

The visibility is great.

We have found the solution to be very straightforward to set up.

The solution is stable.

It can scale well. 

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SB
Admin at IEC (Electoral Commission of South Africa)

The main value of any Microsoft product is the ease of use. You can achieve more with less time. That's what's beneficial for me. With many competitors, you might need to spend more time coming up with a solution because you have to focus on taking care of the product.

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TY
Technical Consultant at LinkDev

Overall, it works well. 

The performance is good.

It's saved time using visualization descriptions. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The product is scalable.

It's stable. 

We find the solution to be reasonable. 

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Waqar Malik - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst at National University of Sciences and Technology

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the convenience it offers, along with the ability to refresh data.

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Dhruv Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect (Data and AI) at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is easy to use and developer friendly. Many customizations can be performed with a good grasp of the C# language.

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ArturKowalczyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Innovation Leader at Netrix S.A.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to use and it offers a flexible custom script task.

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YY
Manager, Data & Intelligence Group, Technical at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

The UI is very user-friendly and I like that the solution has the ability to adapt to multiple data sources. 

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Anil Jha - PeerSpot reviewer
Director D&A at Iris Software Inc.

SSIS integrates well with SQL servers and Microsoft products.

From a cost perspective, it's a cheaper option than other ETL tools.

Also, it has a lot of in-built transformation, and it's easy to learn.

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EL
BI Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

It's a competent product. You can do a lot of things with it and learn how to use it. You can't do modern things with it, but you can do legacy things with it.

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BA
Sr. Architect - Data warehousing & BI at Molina Healthcare, Inc.

The most valuable features of this solution are the fast insert and fuzzy logic matching.

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Elena Tejadillos - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Officer in Data Science at United Nations

There are many good features in this solution including the data fields, database integration, support for SQL views, and the lookups for matching information.

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AN
CEO at Shiraz University

Usually, when I want to import data from other databases I use this solution. It's been about fifteen years that I've worked with an SQL server, and I'm a software developer. I've had many companies with different databases, and it's ranged from FoxPro, EDX and Oracle, and some other databases. When I want to import data I usually use this tool for importing data from the other databases to the server. It is really good, and it's solved many problems for me because I can choose the source table, destination table, source field, and destination field. I can match these things, I can write some queries to do this and because of that, I use this tool.

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AltanAtabarut - PeerSpot reviewer
ECommerce Growth Analytics at Akinon

With this solution, there is the potential to expand so that you can immediately write code onto the SQL server. Auto-parallelization is also critical for us. It decides automatically how many parallel sessions you have to run to get your query handled. You don't need to take care of any code, which is ideal. It's also highly scalable.  

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Pavan Yogender - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and CEO at Zertain

The most valuable feature of SSIS is that it can handle real complex transformations.

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BillyJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at DataHyv

SSIS is easy to use. 

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Vichitra Mohan - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Service Team Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

SSIS' most valuable feature is its reporting services.

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MJ
Senior Manager Software Development at Techlogix

Script task and Script component for custom tasks: It gives you power to build your own logic if your requirements are not being fulfilled with existing available components. While the big thing is you can build your own components, that is not so straightforward. 

It's visual design interface is good and you can easily understand the flow. 

The debugging capabilities are great, particularly during data flow execution. You can look into the data and see what's going on in the pipeline. It has good logging capabilities as well.

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IL
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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.

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MG
Technical Product Owner, Team Lead at ARCA

I couldn't point out a specific feature above all others, but I can say the solution is very useful to us. It's well designed and quite straightforward. There isn't much of a learning curve involved. It's a well-documented solution. 

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SP
Principle Consultant at Keyrus South Africa

The most valuable features for our company are the flexibility and the quick turn around time in producing simple ETL solutions. Also, the use of the configuration on Azure. Our clients are basically secret sever based, so it works well there.

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BD
Business Process and Strategy Specialist Advisor at NTTData

The packaging and how it is organized is good for someone that really has never seen ETL before. 

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MP
Senior Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

You can get data from any data source with SSIS and dump it to any outside source. It is helpful. Getting, extracting, converting, and dumping data doesn't require much effort because we can do everything in the user interface. You drag and drop, then give the required input. It's intuitive.

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IS
Director at Netica d.o.o.

The workflow features have been very valuable. You can have automated workflows and all the steps are controlled. The workflow functionality of integration services is excellent.

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Lucas Dreyer - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at BBD

I have used most of the standard SQL features, but the ones that stand out are the Data Flows and Bulk Import.

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CG
BI Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Some of the valuable features I have found with this solution has been the variety of transformations that are possible and it works well with SQL servers. The majority of our clients that I worked for, their whole systems of data is using SQL server which has worked better for them.

The script component is very powerful, things that you cannot normally do, is feasible through C#. If you can write a script you can import it through the Script Task.

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it_user342606 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Lead: Global Markets Data Analytics at Rand Merchant Bank

Its compatibility with Microsoft products has been very valuable to our company. It fits well within the architecture.

The interface is also very good. If users are familiar with Microsoft, then they'll be quite familiar with the interface.

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VD
student at University of Newcastle

It has the ability to be deployed into the cloud through Data Factory, and run completely as a software as a service in the cloud.

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Edgar Talom - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Support Engineer/ Implementation Analyst /DBA at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Like most Microsoft products, SSIS is user-friendly and easy to use. 

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AS
Database Consultant

I like that the data connections and all ODB connections are able to retrieve data from so many different databases. That's not only from SQL but also from other data sources as well. The data flow, which controls the data, including where to store it, is an excellent feature and is one of the most interesting points about SQL Integration Services.

The reporting on the solution is perfect. I didn't expect to see reporting features, but they are great.

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it_user1048011 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Developer at a music company with 501-1,000 employees

We use everything in this solution, including a third party component called COZYROC. We try to explore and use this product to its fullest.

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it_user102120 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Compatibility with the rest of Microsoft BI stack
  • Scripting component which opens unlimited possibilities: by having the full .Net stack/libraries available, if you need a yellow rubber duck to quack every million rows, it will quack
  • Inter-stream dependency mechanism built directly into the tool; the whole ETL solution can be driven off it without having to employ third party software
  • Parallel processing of a data flow: let's say there's five steps in the flow and ech step consumes output from the preceding step; once step #1 is completed and its data passed to step #2, the engine will feed the next batch of rows to step #1. Once the first batch of rows reaches the last step, there are five concurrent steps working on five different data sets, maximizing utilization of server resources
  • All the necessary types of enumerators (files, xml nodes, rows and many more)
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Celine Meesseman - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Ingenia

The most valuable feature is the data integration process. It includes helpful functions such as data mapping, creating a connection, and loading.

The performance and stability are good.

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Shivani Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Veear Analytics pvt limited

The data reader is the most valuable feature. 

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Serdar Erdurak - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Zone Leader at digitallency

The most valuable feature of SSIS is that you can take data from other servers which are not MS SQL Server or Oracle. 

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RH
Assistant Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

In SSIS, the scope is not only to handle ETL challenges, but it will allow us to do so many other tasks, such as DBA activities, scripting, calling any .exe or scripts, etc.

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RS
Big Data Architect, Integration Specialist at Groundswell Group Inc

This solution is easy to implement, has a wide variety of connectors, has support for Visual Basic, and supports the C language.

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KS
Owner at 7Spring Consult

The simplicity of the solution is great. The solution also offers excellent integration.

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JF
BI Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It has a drag and drop feature that makes it easy to use. It has a good user experience because it takes into account your most-used tools and they're lined up nicely so you can just drag and drop without looking too far. It also integrates nicely with Microsoft.

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Alexander Samuel Larico - PeerSpot reviewer
Teaching Professional at Next Idea Lab

The interface is very user-friendly.

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it_user275646 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant with 51-200 employees

Its easy to use, fast to develop. Quite easy to also add C# or other code into ETL flow. Transfer to production is much faster than for example with IBM Infosphere Datastage, you can just copy the packages. Haven't found bugs much at all. Its license cost is also quite cheap compared to IBM and Informatica offerings. Overall when choosing a new ETL software I would look into SSIS or one of the open source tools.

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it_user4014 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services provides you the ability to build ETL solutions with very minimum background knowledge. If you are already familiar with DTS packages or fairly new to ETL, it is very easy for you to start with your first assignment using SSIS.Microsoft SSIS not only provides you the traditional ETL tasks for loading data from source to destination, it also provides you the ability to send emails using it and write your custom code using Script task and offers to process SSAS task, which makes it stand out from its competitors.It is specifically designed to provide high data transfer using parallel computational logic.Very easy to configure and deploy and maintenance is very low. View full review »
ST
Software Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has good data integration and good processes. 

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it_user1080627 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director Business Intelligence at Xtivia

The most valuable features are the relatively short learning curve, and the automation capabilities provided through the BIML add-in for SSDT.

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Buyer's Guide
SSIS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SSIS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.