WhereScape RED Reviews

Producing data warehousing solutions quickly with this DW automation tool. You can generate DWs in many types of formats. We prefer Kimball architected data warehouses.

It has allowed us to produce consistently created, well-documented, easy to maintain DW solutions for our clients.

This is a fantastically, robust DW tool that will make you at least 10 times faster in producing a DW.

• It does all the code generation for you. It has very easy code to read, and it is efficient.
• Auto documentation feature
• Plenty of additional custom documentation features
• It has a built-in automatic scheduling environment.
• Naturally produces a way to easily debug your DW data solutions.

Here are some things that could improve the overall experience:

• A tool to diagnose what is missing from the environment for WhereScape to install successfully.
• Improve the object renaming ability (it works, but it could be more automated).

Never.

No issues.

Support is absolutely excellent, efficient, and timely.

• DataStage
• SSIS

Setup is straightforward, but sometimes the environment being installed does not have some of the basic things the system needs for WhereScape to install properly. 

WhereScape might want to consider evaluating the system for missing things that need to be in place before the install and recommend how to fix those situations to make a successful install.

It was implemented in-house.

At least 10 times.

No.

Automation, Automation, Automation....

Automation of Data Warehouse Tasks - Traditional ETL tools are a one-size-fits-all solution. They can often be like a programming language--you can do anything you could ever imagine, but you have to manually create each and every instruction. This leads to a total lack of agility because you have to manually create each and every step. WhereScape, on the other hand, is meant for the specific task of building data warehouses. The product takes on much of the painful, time-consuming, manual and repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on meeting business requirements.

Automation of Documentation - This is perhaps the best feature of the product. Based on your design, it creates two sets of documentation--one for your technical teams and one for end-users--which show the data model, metadata, and just about anything else you’d want to know about the model.

Impact Analysis - During the lifetime of a data warehouse, there is regularly a need to enhance and extend the warehouse, but it can often be difficult to understand how changes will impact other things downstream. In WhereScape, you can simply click on an object and perform an impact analysis to see how changes to that object will impact other objects. You can also do the reverse of this, looking at an object and “tracking back” to see what objects are used to build it.

Code Runs on the Database - When you build objects in WhereScape (through a point-and-click GUI), the product automatically generates target-specific code. So, for instance, if your target platform is SQL Server, it will generate T-SQL stored procedures for updating your warehouse objects. When jobs are run, this code gets executed on the target database. This essentially means that the ETL is serverless. You do not need a massively sized ETL server to handle the ETL code because it’s simply code being handled by the database, which in my experience, is much more efficient.

We are able to build data models much faster than previously and much faster than using a traditional ETL tool. It allows us to focus on the most important aspect of a data warehouse--business requirements--instead of focusing on the low-level details of the development platform.

As with any product, there are things that can be improved, but most are fairly minor, including things like greater flexibility in ordering job tasks. I’d also like to see increased support for NoSQL data sources.

We have been using the product for about 5 months.

None yet. Because there is no server component, other than a lightweight job scheduler, it’s really just the installation of the software and some basic initial setup. Couldn’t be easier.

No.

No.

Very good customer service. Kind, helpful, and knowledgeable.

This is another area where WhereScape shines. They are not a huge organization, so you get very prompt and personalized care. My support tickets are always answered very quickly and they listen to my suggestions. And, perhaps most importantly, their support team knows the product inside and out. You will not deal with inexperienced first-level support techs.

They also made experts available to help us quickly answer any questions about best practices, how to accomplish specific tasks, etc.

Our purchase of WhereScape was part of a larger re-architecture of our data warehouse. We chose to move away from other products for a variety of reasons, but our choice of WhereScape was largely based on its ability to speed up the development process through automation.

As noted previously, the software generates database code for the target platform and runs that code on the database server itself, so it’s very lightweight. The only components are 1) Client Software and 2) A Lightweight Scheduler. The installation of these two components is very quick and easy.

In-house, although we did get some help from their professional services group, largely for advice on best practices, how to handle complex data transformations, etc. The team is very knowledgeable and seems to have answers to just about every complex question we could think of.

Probably a bit too early to report on this but we expect a good ROI.

The product is much less expensive than traditional ETL tools. Licensing is very simple to understand.

Yes, we looked at various traditional ETL packages as well as other Data Warehouse automation tools. We chose WhereScape over traditional ETL for reasons noted previously and chose WhereScape over other automation tools because it appeared to be the most mature of these solutions.

As other reviewers have noted, data warehouse automation requires you to change your thinking and perspective somewhat. If you are looking at this product as a simple replacement for your existing ETL and try to use it exactly the way you used ETL, then you will not fully realize the functional benefits (the cost benefits will still be there though). You need to think more in terms of agile data warehouse design. For those new to this concept, I recommend a book called “Agile Data Warehouse Design: Collaborative Dimensional Modeling, from Whiteboard to Star Schema” by Lawrence Corr and Jim Stagnitto. WhereScape fits very nicely into the concepts presented in the book.

ETL processing in SQL Server into structures which are suitable for supporting business reporting needs. Automation of the importing and processing work.

WhereScape RED has improved our business's ability to generate needed reporting without requiring a large team of developers to manually code all of the necessary plumbing. WhereScape does a good job of handling this on its own.

WhereScape's deployment package is a fantastic feature. The application allows for selecting specific objects that you would like to deploy from one environment to another rather than deploying the entire database. This allows us to easily work as an agile team. At deployment time, WhereScape determines how to make the objects in the selected destination match the objects in the deployment application (through create and drop, then create and alter, etc.). Therefore, regardless of the state of the destination, we can be confident that the deployed objects will match the objects that we intended to deploy without disturbing anything else in the database. This is a huge benefit to our process because we can quickly create these packages, handing them off to teams who will be deployed to testing and production environments. All they have to do is deploy the package as-is.

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.

Quickly develops a data warehouse for our organization with documentation and can track back/forward features.

Speed to market of a warehouse solution at a relatively inexpensive price point.  We used a consultant to get us started, but the tutorials offered by product were very helpful as well.

Documentation and the ability to track back/forward from fields, processes, etc. Data transformations and rollups are easy to accomplish.

A more robust support center. It has been a bit difficult to find solutions to problems that are out-of-the-box. It would be nice to have user groups available on their website. 

The ability to execute SSIS projects within WhereScape would be nice because we have a lot of packages that are too cumbersome to recreate.

• The automatic generation of all scripts allows for a very agile development process.
• Wherescape also generates very thorough documentation automatically.

The development speed was greatly improved by using WhereScape. It saves time in virtually every aspect of building a Data Warehouse. It provides a great overview of everything you've created which makes trouble-shooting much easier as well.

There are some newer features that haven't been included in the training materials yet so they're a little outdated (although the help documentation is very good).

There are also some more complex data transformations that aren't supported and so need to be done in multiple steps.

We are two months into an enterprise-wide data warehousing project using Wherescape as the primary tool.

No deployment issues noticed.

No.

No.

In our experience they are happy to help and quick to reply with development solutions whenever needed.

No, this was a ground-up Data Warehouse build.

The initial setup is very easy and we were able to begin development almost immediately.

We are a data analytics consultancy that is implementing WhereScape for one of our clients.

Two months into the project we are currently 50% under budget due to how quickly it's possible to develop large-scale solutions in WhereScape. We were able to train a team with no prior WhereScape experience and begin development in much less time than if we built a standard data-warehouse, while writing procedures and creating our own documentation.

WhereScape pays for itself very quickly.

We considered many alternatives including only using SSIS and SQL Server to build the entire warehouse.

WhereScape Red helps to speed things up. It has many useful features and version 8 is  reliable. When I first started using it after having worked with Cognos Data Manager, I didn't really find it to be an enterprise-level tool because it was still very flaky. In fact, it had quite a number of bugs. It would fail on every second thing. If you are using it for some basic tasks, it will work fine, but as soon as you try some of the more complex features it would fail. I've seen a lot of improvement in the new versions.

Among the features I found most valuable is its support for Kimball Methodology and data warehousing best practices.

The schedular needs improvement 

I don't think the solution is very stable. I find that once you use this tool, you would like to have it in your tool kit. Even though I like this tool numerous bugs made it difficult and unreliable . Several of them have been fixed in the new releases. At an enterprise-level, you need a lot more. 

The scalability seems okay. It handles most of the data for our 30 sources. We are giving each source an independent repository and a separate EDW repo that uses synonyms for the target objects in the source repos.

We currently have six developers or data engineers using WhereScape, but we don't plan to increase the number, because training is not very cheap.

We have the advantage of having very close access to WhereScape's technical support. It was easy to get them to come on-site and answer many of the issues that we've had. That was quite a significant advantage.

I found the initial setup very easy. In fact, after one month of using it, I was able to have an independent setup on my own workstation. that shows how easy it is to set it up.

I started using this solution with MPI (Ministry for Primary Industries) .They have been a long-term customer of WhereScape Red. When I joined them, they had about 5 WhereScape Red users.

I would not hesitate to say that if someone has really limited time for a project it can make a difference and you can have the data ready for use in a very short period of time. This can be a lifesaver. I will rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

• Good fit with agile development including requirements discovery and data discovery
• Embedding of standards and design patterns into the tool yields substantial quality and consistency gains
• Schema generation
• Source-to-target mapping automation
• Code/script generation
• Test automation
• Versioning at multiple levels from objects to entire data warehouse
• Scheduling / runtime management functions

• Agility
• Speed of deployment
• Quick response to changes in requirements and changes in source data
• Skilled people no longer burdened with repetitive low-value tasks

• Data discovery would be more powerful with machine learning features
• Big data functions could include some of the features of the advanced self-service data preparation tools

Excellent

Excellent.

Reviewed several other solutions and chose WhereScape because:

(1) It is built by practitioners, for practitioners

(2) It is a "white box" solution. You can see (and even modify) everything that is generated. It doesn't lock you in like the "black box" proprietary products.

Don't confuse data warehouse automation with ETL automation. DWA automates the entire data warehousing life cycle. Change your approach (think agile), change your processes (think end-to-end ... source data to business impact), and change your perspective (think cyclic, not linear). Without these changes you miss out on many of the benefits of automation.