ibi DataMigrator Reviews

That's just it with the main use case for us more recently. We have it, we're licensed for it. We can make sure it works, but we don't really use ibi DataMigrator. ibi DataMigrator is an Extract, Transform, and Load tool, so we're not extracting data. We have an entire team of about 50 people that do that with various tools. Our databases are Oracle and DB2, which are mainframe-based. We can connect to them, but we don't touch the data; that's done by our entire ETL team. We have it, we've used it, but not very often.

The automation feature with ibi DataMigrator depends on how often you're using it. In our situation, we don't take advantage of that because we don't really use it, but if you're getting data every week, then you're going to have to repeat that update and transform process. Once you have the system set up, you could schedule that to happen at any time. In their client product, there is a feature called ReportCaster. The servers can schedule things; so there are ways that you could schedule this. If you're reading from ten different files, writing out to two different files, this can be scheduled daily, weekly, hourly, or at the end of the year, whatever you would need.

The best features of ibi DataMigrator are that you can basically extract data. If you have a large data set and you want to summarize it, you could do that. It will transform data; if there's certain logic regarding health criteria, such as how many men come down with cervical cancer, the answer is none, as this is a female-only disease. So, if you come across a case where someone says this is a male and he's got this type of cancer, you could transform the data, the gender, to female.

I would assess the tool's error handling and logging features as part of it involves having a sampling thing. Depending on the definition of who's doing this, I used to work at a university where we looked at students who registered, and there were people who could register without specifying their gender. Most people know their gender. Some people would not put their birth date, so their date of birth was the default century. In 1989, we had hundreds of 89-year-olds because it was noted as 1900. What we would do is quickly assess that this is not reasonable; in a college setting, how many 89-year-olds are standing in line for freshman orientation?

We could produce transformations on the fly. You can look at stuff, but ultimately, you need to go back to the data. There's logic involved; do you have to have a six-digit zip? Do you need the six plus four? It all depends on your criteria. It's doable, but it takes time, and if there's a lot of that, they usually hire people just to handle it. It's a tool that has its limitations; they haven't added wonderful features, and it's a GUI tool based on a desktop that you can run. Their manuals are pretty good, but we're not really using it actively, so I can't tell you everything right now.

I still have experience with Information Builders solutions and I'm considered a subject matter expert.

I would rate the Information Builders support on a scale of one to ten as it used to be really good. However, they've gone downhill. You can get an answer through their Gold Support. If you have that, you can get an answer, but lately, in the last 12 months, I have received wrong answers that I know were wrong. I pointed it out, and it was concerning why I as the client was telling the support people that they're wrong. I can prove it on chapter and verse.

I had good experiences with the tool's error handling and logging features when I worked for IBI about ten years ago; I was in charge of support, and we knew how to get answers to anything. However, when they were sold to TIBCO and went to the cloud, they let a lot of the support people go, and they offshored it. Many of these people strive, but I've gotten answers where they would spell URLs wrong. I would point out where on page 75 is the correct answer we found. That's frustrating.

I would rate the current support at about a five. They used to be a ten and even received awards for it, but they're not at that level now. We are doing a proof of concept with one of their other products—not the ETL, and I have not opened an ETL case. Their products work wonderfully during demos, but when we install them, they don't, and I end up following their manual only to find they forgot to mention something important. I've been testing a product called DSML, data science, and analytics program. It works intermittently, and we keep telling them it doesn't work; we send logs and report problems.

Positive

I don't have details about the pricing or licensing of ibi DataMigrator. I stay away from money matters; the last time I bought something was 35 years ago while trying to convince people it was worth it. We have an enterprise license, and I support over 50 different WebFOCUS systems on 50 different machines, so I can't provide a value, but I have been told it's cheaper than other products.

Other products such as Tableau Prep and Alteryx do similar things, and it really depends on your background. If you've experienced it, it works great. I would say it's at least an eight or nine, easily. Could it improve? Not that I'm aware of; it's still chugging away.

We've been setting up IBM DB2 for a long time; we've joked about it since it was DB1. I cannot speak to its setup complexity; we have two data centers and entire teams, hundreds of people who set these systems up. We have failover, and everything we have is run on development, testing, and QA before it goes live.

Regarding their real-time data integration, the ETL, the setup, that whole logic is done on a desktop environment and then it's uploaded to a server that runs and can schedule them. IBI has led the way for many years because they can read and write any data set. Now, as people are going more vendor-specific, aside from IBM and Microsoft, there are all these big data queries. For proprietary files such as Tableau Hyper files or SAP's data sets that are proprietary, you don't write out to those, and that's SAP's decision. Microsoft is moving off of reading there into what they call the Fabric and the Lake, so if it's published data, then it works. However, if it's their secret thing, and you don't know the secret handshake, they are working toward that. They've always had 200 or 300 different adapters, so they can read and write anything.

My overall rating for ibi DataMigrator is 9 out of 10.