IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer Reviews

My company used IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer mostly for data analysis and data quality checks.

What's most useful in IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is you can access it from anywhere. It's also pretty easy to learn, so even non-technical business people use it and found the solution easy to learn.

What could be improved or added to IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is more connectors. This solution comes in a package with IBM InfoSphere DataStage and is missing a lot of connectors to various, new data sources, so IBM needs to work on that area. Compared with competitors such as Informatica and Alation which acquired other small companies to work on the connectors, IBM has not done any testing and has tried to develop the connectors in-house, but that's taking a lot of time. As a result, my company is unable to connect to a lot of data sources, particularly modern data sources.

I've used IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer for around four years, and my last experience with the solution was in the past twelve months.

IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer, particularly its latest version, has some stability issues. My company faced some serious issues with stability and had to repeatedly go to IBM to have the issues fixed.

IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is a scalable product.

The technical support for IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is available, but because IBM has completely rearchitected the product, some issues creep up now and then. The technical support team is available but sometimes isn't able to fix the issues immediately. Support for IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer takes some time to roll out patches or fix issues.

Setting up IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer has not been very easy because it comes with some microservices and other functionalities that IBM brought into the picture. The setup wasn't that easy, but it wasn't extremely difficult either, so it's somewhere in between. Setting up IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is moderately difficult, and on a scale of one to five, I'm rating the complexity of setting it up a three.

The solution was completely deployed within three to four hours.

We implemented IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer within the company in-house, but for some customers who bought the product from IBM, it was IBM that assisted in terms of setting it up.

For the licensing cost of IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer, I have no information on the exact cost, but as it's bundled with other IBM products such as IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog and IBM InfoSphere DataStage, the bundle is expensive when compared to competitor pricing.

I evaluated Informatica and Alation products.

In my company, around twenty to thirty people use IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer, but in client organizations, more people use the product.

Clients use other solutions such as IDQ (Informatica Data Quality), Talend Data Quality, and Collibra which have better or at least the same standards as IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer.

My advice to others who want to start using IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is that it's a very good product because it has a lot of handy features, and it's a product that's easier to learn and that even non-technical people can use it. Its latest version has stability issues, so hopefully, IBM will be able to fix that in the upcoming releases, so if you are okay with that, IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is a good product.

I would rate IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer seven out of ten because of its stability issues.

We use all the tools in their suite, and their data quality and governance are great. You can do data profiling and quality analysis with the IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer. You can also schedule and run data quality on the critical data elements on the databases.

Data profiling and executing data quality on critical data elements on a scheduled basis is very valuable.

They have developed a new product called Watson Catalog, an upgrade from IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer. It is a cloud patch for data. The solution is outdated and is not on cloud. In addition, it is client-based, so clients are not enough to use it.

We have been using this solution for 14 years.

If it is set up correctly, then it will work properly. However, if it is not set up correctly, there may be issues with large volumes of data. In addition, the patches must be updated regularly, and you may be in trouble if you miss any updates.

It is not easily scalable.

Technical support is okay but slower than expected and depends on the service package you buy from IBM.

The initial setup was complex and not very intuitive. You have to be very knowledgeable to complete the setup, and it is not an easy-to-use tool. It would be sufficient to have one dedicated administrator who can deploy updates and maintain the solution for about 10 to 20 hours a month.

I rate the solution a four out of ten. The solution is useful and can do the job, but there are other new tools in the market today.

Data profiling, data quality reporting 

Sometimes a project knows little about its data. IA is good at data profiling / data discovery. It can give insight into data about data type, format, uniqueness, completeness, frequency distribution, etc. The other powerful feature of IA is its ability to check data against business rules. It can give statistics on how many records violate a rule.

Data rules, column analysis, virtual tables

The interface is not the most friendly. Performance.

There are also these following features - documented in the user guide - but do not work:

1. Global Logical Variables (GLVs)

2. Migrating projects. Neither the internal method (Export/Import) nor the command line interface (CLI) method work 100%. They sometimes error out.

3. When you open a data rule and do no modifications, when you close it, IA asks if you want to save the changes, even if you did not make any. A bit disturbing when you know you did not change anything yet you start to doubt what you think you know.

My wish list for new features:

1. Ability to use functions on data sources. I do not understand how IBM could miss this. Data sources are not visible when coding custom expressions. For example if you have a field called CUSTOMER.ACCOUNT_NUM, you cannot code TRIM(ACCOUNT_NUM). My workaround is to create a variable in the rule definition then bind it in the data rule. Functions can only be applied to variables, not directly to fields. I have a rule where I do things to about 12 fields - concatenate, substring, length, coalesce, etc - and I had to make up 12 lines in the definition that do nothing but refer to these variables. I had to invent a rule so I coded seemingly useless rule conditions like address1 = address1 just so I have a variable for the field I want to code functions for. Huge oversight on the part of IBM.

2. Copy a data rule and modify the copy. Right now only rule definitions can be copied, not data rules. Sometimes I need to create two or more versions of the same rule. IA forces me to generate each of them from scratch. This is annoying when version 2 is only slightly different from version 1. If it took me an hour to code the original, it would take me close to that amount of time to code the new version. If I could copy and modify, the effort would only take maybe 5 minutes.

3. The date of last modification. IA only shows the date of creation which is generally useless. The last modification date is far more important and needs to be available and visible.

4. A file manager, a la Windows Explorer. I may want to see the list of rules and sort them by date of modification.

5. Enhanced dedup on output. Currently, IA can only exclude duplicates based on the entire record. It should allow deduping on a select set of columns.

6. Feature to select one record from multiple matches in a join. For instance, in Oracle SQL, one can FETCH FIRST ROW ONLY or use ROWNUM or TOP 1.

7. Ability to sort the output.

8. New virtual tables take a while to appear. You create one and the list doesn't list the new table. Wait 15 minutes or so and maybe it will be listed. Or log out and log back in. 

Since 2008. 

The tool sometimes crashes or freezes. But the latest version, 11.7, is more than stable than previous ones. 

Customer Service:

Scale of 1 to 10: 8. While IBM is excellent at responding to inquiries, it is slow to implement much-needed software fixes. While that is common in the industry, I would still like to see IBM fix software bugs sooner.

Technical Support:

Same as customer service.

Positive

No never had the chance.

I have not been involved in setup but I understand it is very complex, not for the faint of heart.

Excellent!

I was not involved in the selection. 

Get the latest version. Compare with competing products. Know that there are not many experts in the product and that they may pay a premium to hire them.

Data profiling and data quality control

I worked on a project which was to enable the Impact Analysis for the changes happened in source system. By leveraging the IA data profiling capability, the profiling result was re-directed into an external database container, and some of BI reports were generated on top of that to support monitoring the data quality.

The product can be better in the future by improving the following:

1. Make the IA db more visible so that the analyzed result and output of data rule executable can be easily seen by external programs


2. Enhance the integration between DataStage and Information Analyzer. Since v8.7, the Data Rule stage has been introduced which has dramatically enabled and eased the use of Data rules in IA. I would like to see a similar stage or solution that can be useful in terms of data profiling


3. Support more CLIs or extend the existing IAAdmin.sh and IAJob.sh scripts, which could be more flexible for the end users.


4. Provide more log details when running any data profiling or rules from the console directly. As of v9.1, the troubleshooting process is still painful. Developers have to do that from multiple places, either from the underlying DataStage job log or the log files placed in both server and client side.

3+ months

Yes. When I tried to deploy some data rules in production, the package has to be placed on the server. This could be better if IA supports the package located on the machine where the client software installed.

Yes. When trying to run a data rule towards tables containing big volume of data, the IA db does not perform well.

Well, the setup is not complex because the IA is one of Information Server components, however, as a post-installation the configuration process for the end users is not simple. Users have to manually setup the IA db from provided scripts, configure the engine and IA db connections from the console.

Information Analyzer is still a good product. It enables the auto data profiling for the end users and it is also capable of doing data quality analysis via business language oriented rules. Being a component of Information Server suite, IA is also leveraging some advantages from it, like shared metadata and powerful parallel engine. Although there are some features which need to be enhanced, I would still recommend others to use IA as a product for data profiling and data quality control.