Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

Currently, I am using Pentaho Data Integration for transforming data and then loading it into different platforms. Sometimes, I use it in conjunction with AWS, particularly S3 and Redshift, to execute the copy command for data processing.

Pentaho Data Integration is easy to use, especially when transforming data. I can find the necessary steps for any required transformation, and it is very efficient for pivoting, such as transforming rows into columns. It is also free of cost and rich in available transformations, allowing extensive data manipulations.

I experience difficulties when handling millions of rows, as the data movement from one source to another becomes challenging. The processing speed slows down significantly, especially when using a table output for Redshift. The availability of Python code integration as an inbuilt function would be beneficial.

I have been using Pentaho Data Integration since 2018.

I would rate the stability of Pentaho Data Integration as eight out of ten.

Pentaho Data Integration has a scalability rating around 8.5 out of ten, as noted from our experience.

I have contacted customer support once or twice, however, did not receive a response. Therefore, I have not had much interaction with the support team, and their assistance does not seem frequent.

Pentaho Data Integration's main competitor is Talend. Many companies are moving towards cloud-based ETL solutions.

The initial setup is simple. It involves downloading the tool, installing necessary libraries, like the JDBC library for your databases, and then creating a connection to start working.

Pentaho Data Integration is low-priced, especially since it is free of cost.

I rate Pentaho Data Integration seven out of ten. I definitely recommend it for small to medium organizations, especially if you are looking for a cost-effective product.

I have used the solution to gather data from multiple sources, including APIs, databases like Oracle, and web servers. There are a bunch of data providers available who can provide you with datasets to export in JSON format from clouds or APIs. 

The solution offers features for data integration and migration. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics allows the integration of multiple data sources into one. The product is user-friendly and intuitive to use for almost any business. 

The solution should provide additional control for the data warehouse and reduce its size, as our organization's clients have expressed concerns regarding it. The vendor can focus on reducing capacity and compensate for it by enhancing product efficiency. 

I have been using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics for a year.  

I have never encountered any issues with Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics. 

I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors. 

I have worked with IBM DataStage along with Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics. The found the IBM DataStage interface to seem outdated in comparison to the Pentaho tool. IBM DataStage demands the user to drag and drop the services as well as the pipelines, similar to the process in SSIS platforms. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is also easier to comprehend from the first use than IBM DataStage. 

The solution's ETL capabilities make data integration tasks easier and are used to export data from a source to a destination. At my company, I am using IBM data switches and the overall IBM tech stack for compatibility among the integrations, pipelines and user levels. 

I would absolutely recommend Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics to others. I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I have a team who has experience with integration. We are service providers and partners. Generally, clients buy the product directly from the company.

It is easy to use, install, and start working with. This is one of the advantages compared to other key vaulting products. The relationship between price and functionality is excellent, resulting in time and money savings of between twenty-five and thirty percent.

One of the advantages is that it is easy to use, install, and start working with. For certain volumes of data, the solution is very efficient.

Pentaho may be less efficient for large volumes of data compared to other solutions like Talend or Informatica. Larger data jobs take more time to execute.

Pentaho is more appropriate for jobs with smaller volumes of data.

I have used the solution for more than ten years.

The solution is stable. Generally, one person can manage and maintain it.

Sometimes, for large volumes of data, a different solution might be more appropriate. Pentaho is suited for smaller volumes of data, while Talend is better for larger volumes.

Based on my experience, the solution has been reliable.

Positive

We did a comparison between Talend and Pentaho last year.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to install and start working with.

A team with experience in integration manages the implementation.

The relationship between price and functionality is excellent. It results in time and money savings of between twenty-five and thirty percent.

Pentaho is cheaper than other solutions. The relationship between price and functionality means it provides good value for money.

We evaluated Talend and Pentaho.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The use cases involve loading the data into the required tables based on the transformations. We do a couple of transformations, and based on the business requirement, we load the data into the required tables.

It's a very lightweight tool. It can be plug-and-played easily and read data from multiple sources. It's a very good tool for small to large companies. People or customers can learn very easily to do the transformations for loading and migrating data. It's a fantastic tool in the open-source community.

When compared to other commercial ETL tools, this is a free tool where you can download and do multiple things that the commercial tools are doing. It's a pretty good tool when compared to other commercial tools. It's available in community and enterprise editions. It's very easy to use.

It is difficult to process huge amounts of data. We need to test it end-to-end and conclude how much is the processing of data. If it is an enterprise edition, we can process the data.

I have been using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics for 11-12 years.

We process a small amount of data, but it's pretty good.

It's scalable across any machine,

Support is satisfactory. A few of my colleagues are also there, working with Hitachi to provide solutions whenever a ticket or Jira is raised for them. 

Positive

Installation is very simple. When you go to the community and enterprise edition, it's damn simple. Even you can install it very easily.

One person is enough for the installation

The product is quite cheap.

It can quickly implement slowly changing dimensions and efficiently read flat files, loading them into tables quickly. Additionally, "several copies to the stat h enables parallel partitioning. In the Enterprise Edition, you can restart your jobs from where they left off, a valuable feature for ensuring continuity. Detailed metadata integration is also very straightforward, which is an advantage. It is lightweight and can work on various systems.

Any technical guy can do everything end to end.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My work primarily revolves around data migration and data integration for different products. I have used them in different companies, but for most of our use cases, we use it to integrate all the data that needs to flow into our product. Also, we can have outbound from our product when we need to send to different, various integration points. We use this product extensively to build ETLs for those use cases.

We are developing ETLs for the inbound data into the product as well as outbound to various integration points. Also, we have a number of core ETLs written on this platform to enhance our product.

We have two different modes that we offer: one is on-premises and the other is on the cloud. On the cloud, we have an EC2 instance on AWS, then we have installed that EC2 instance and we call it using the ETL server. We also have another server for the application where the product is installed.

We use version 8.3 in the production environment, but in the dev environment, we use version 9 and onwards.

We have been able to reduce the effort required to build sophisticated ETLs. Also, we now are in the migration phase from an on-prem product to a cloud-native application. 

We use Lumada’s ability to develop and deploy data pipeline templates once and reuse them. This is very important. When the entire pipeline is automated, we do not have any issues in respect to deployment of code or with code working in one environment but not working in another environment. We have saved a lot of time and effort from that perspective because it is easy to build ETL pipelines.

The metadata injection feature is the most valuable because we have used it extensively to build frameworks, where we have used it to dynamically generate code based on different configurations. If you want to make a change at all, you do not need to touch the actual code. You just need to make some configuration changes and the framework will dynamically generate code for that as per your configuration. 

We have a UI where we can create our ETL pipelines as needed, which is a key advantage for us. This is very important because it reduces the time to develop for a given project. When you need to build the whole thing using code, you need to do multiple rounds of testing. Therefore, it helps us to save some effort on the QA side.

Hitachi Vantara's roadmap has a pretty good list of features that they have been releasing with every new version. For instance, in version 9, they have included metadata injection for some of the steps. The most important elements of this roadmap to our organization’s strategy are the data-driven approach that this product is taking and the fact that we have a very low-code platform. Combining these two is what gives us the flexibility to utilize this software to enhance our product.

It could be better integrated with programming languages, like Python and R. Right now, if I want to run a Python code on one of my ETLs, it is a bit difficult to do. It would be great if we have some modules where we could code directly in a Python language. We don't really have a way to run Python code natively. 

I have been working with this tool for five to six years.

They are making it a lot more stable. Earlier, stability used to be an issue when it was not with Hitachi. Now, we don't see those kinds of issues or bugs within the platform because it has become far more stable. Also, we see a lot of new big data features, such as connecting to the cloud.

Lumada is flexible to deploy in any environment, whether on-premises or the cloud, which is very important. When we are processing data in batches on certain days, e.g., at the end of the week or month, we might have more data and need more processing power or RAM. However, most times, there might be very minimal usage of that CPU power. In that way, the solution has helped us to dynamically scale up, then scale down when we see that we have more data that we need to process.

The scalability is another key advantage of this product versus some of the others in the market since we can tweak and modify a number of parameters. We are really impressed with the scalability.

We have close to 80 people who are using this product actively. Their roles go all the way from junior developers to support engineers. We also have people who have very little coding knowledge and are more into the management side of things utilizing this tool.

I haven't been part of any technical support discussions with Hitachi.

We are very satisfied with our decision to purchase Hitachi's product. Previously, we were using another ETL service that had a number of limitations. It was not a modern ETL service at all. For anything, we had to rely on another third-party software. Then, with Hitachi Lumada, we don't have to do that. In that way, we are really satisfied with the orchestration or cloud-native steps that they offer. We are really happy on those fronts.

We were using something called Actian Services, which had less features and it ended up costing more than the enterprise edition of Pentaho.

We could not do a number of things on Actian. For instance, we were unable to call other APIs or connect to an S3 bucket. It was not a very modern solution. Whereas, with Pentaho, we could do all these things as well as have great marketplaces where we could find various modules and third-party plugins. Those features were simply not there in the other tool.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

We did not have any issues configuring it, even in my local machine. For the enterprise edition, we have a separate infrastructure team doing that. However, for at least the community edition, the deployment is pretty straightforward.

We have seen at least 30% savings in terms of effort. That has helped us to price our service and products more aggressively in the market, helping us to win more clients.

It has reduced our ETL development time. Per project, it has reduced by around 30% to 35%.

We can price more aggressively. We were actually able to win projects because we had great reusability of ETLs. A code that was used for one client can be reused with very minimal changes. We didn't have any upfront cost for kick-starting projects using the Community edition. It is only the Enterprise edition that has a cost. 

For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment.

We did evaluate SSIS since our database is based on Microsoft SQL server. SSIS comes with any purchase of an SQL Server license. However, even with SSIS, there were some limitations. For example, if you want to build a package and reuse it, SSIS doesn't provide the same kinds of abilities that Pentaho does. The amount of reusability reduces when we try to build the same thing using SSIS. Whereas, in Pentaho, we could literally reuse the same code by using some of its features.

SSIS comes with the SQL Server and is easier to maintain, given that there are far more people who would have knowledge of SSIS. However, if I want to do a PCP encryption or make an API connection, it is difficult. To create a reusable package is not that easy, which would be the con for SSIS. 

The query performance depends on the database. It is more likely to be good if you have a good database server with all the indexes and bells and whistles of a database. However, from a data integration tool perspective, I am not seeing any issues with respect to query performance.

We do not build visualization features that much with Hitachi. For the reporting purposes, we have been using one of the tools from the product, then prepare the data accordingly. 

We use this for all the projects that we are currently running. Going forward, we will be sticking only to using this ETL tool.

We haven't had any roadblocks using Lumada Data Integration.

On a scale of one to 10, I would recommend Hitachi Vantara to a friend or colleague as a nine.

If you need to build ETLs quickly in a low-code environment, where you don't want to spend a lot of time on the development side of things but it is a little difficult to find resources, then train them in this product. It is always worth that effort because it ends up saving a lot of time and resources on the development side of projects.

Overall, I would rate the product as a nine out of 10.

We are a service delivery enterprise, and we have different use cases. We deliver solutions to other enterprises, such as banks. One of the use cases is for real-time analytics of the data we work with. We take CDC data from Oracle Database, and in real-time, we generate a product offer for all the products of a client. All this is in real-time. The client could be at the ATM or maybe at an agency, and they can access the product offer. 

We also use Pentaho within our organization to integrate all the documents and Excel spreadsheets from our consultants and have a dashboard for different hours for different projects.

In terms of version, currently, Pentaho Data Integration is on version 9, but we are using version 8.2. We have all the versions, but we work with the most stable one. 

In terms of deployment, we have two different types of deployments. We have on-prem and private cloud deployments.

I work with a lot of data. We have about 50 terabytes of information, and working with Pentaho Data Integration along with other databases is very fast.

Previously, I had three people to collect all the data and integrate all Excel spreadsheets. To give me a dashboard with the information that I need, it took them a day or two. Now, I can do this work in about 15 minutes.

It enables us to create pipelines with minimal manual coding or custom coding efforts, which is one of its best features. Pentaho is one of the few tools with which you can do anything you can imagine. Our business is changing all the time, and it is best for our business if I can use less time to develop new pipelines.

It provides the ability to develop and deploy data pipeline templates once and reuse them. I use them at least once a day. It makes my daily life easier when it comes to data pipelines.

Previously, I have used other tools such as Integration Services from Microsoft, Data Services for SAP, and Informatica. Pentaho reduces the ETL implementation time by 5% to 50%.

Pentaho from Hitachi is a suite of different tools. Pentaho Data Integration is a part of the suite, and I love the drag-and-drop functionality. It is the best. 

Its drag-and-drop interface lets me and my team implement all the solutions that we need in our company very quickly. It's a very good tool for that.

Their client support is very bad. It should be improved. There is also not much information on Hitachi forums or Hitachi web pages. It is very complicated.

In terms of the flexibility to deploy in any environment, such as on-premise or in the cloud, we can do the cloud deployment only through virtual machines. We might also be able to work on different environments through Docker or Kubernetes, but we don't have an Azure app or an AWS app for easy deployment to the cloud. We can only do it through virtual machines, which is a problem, but we can manage it. We also work with Databricks because it works with Spark. We can work with clustered servers, and we can easily do the deployment in the cloud. With a right-click, we can deploy Databricks through the app on AWS or Azure cloud.

I have been using Pentaho Data Integration for 12 years. The first version that I tested and used was 3.2 in 2010.

Their technical support is not good. I would rate them 2 out of 10 because they don't have good technical skills to solve problems.

Negative

It is very quick and simple. It takes about five minutes.

I have a good knowledge of this solution, and I would highly recommend it to a friend or colleague. 

It provides a single, end-to-end data management experience from ingestion to insights, but we have to create different pipelines to generate the metadata management. It's a little bit laborious to work with Pentaho, but we can do that.

I've heard a lot of people say it's complicated to use, but Pentaho is one of the few tools where you can do anything you can imagine. It is very good and quite simple, but you need to have the right knowledge and the right people to handle the tool. The skills needed to create a business intelligence solution or a data integration solution with Pentaho are problem-solving logic and maybe database knowledge. You can develop new steps, and you can develop new functionality in Pentaho Lumada, but you must have the knowledge of advanced Java programming. Our experience, in general, is very good. 

Overall, I am satisfied with our decision to purchase Hitachi's product services and solutions. My satisfaction level is at an eight out of ten.

I am not much aware of the roadmap of Hitachi Vantara. I don't read much about that.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We mainly use Lumada to load our operational systems into our data warehouse, but we also use it for monthly reporting out of the data warehouse, so it's to and from. We use some of Lumada's other features within the business to move data around. It's become quite the Swiss army knife.

We're primarily doing batch-type reports that go out. Not many people want to sift through data and pick it to join it in other things. There are a few, but again, I usually wind up doing it. The self-serve feature is not as big a seller to me because of our user base. Most of the people looking at it are salespeople.

Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool aspects is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing. 

The process that Lumada replaced was arcane. The sentiment among our employees, particularly the warehouse personnel, was that it was punitive. They would say, "I didn't get a bonus this month because the warehouse manager didn't like me." Now we can show them the numbers and say, "You didn't get a bonus because you were slacking off compared to everybody else." It's allowed us to be very transparent in how we're doing these tasks. Previously, that was all done behind the vest. I want people to trust the numbers, and these tools allow me to do that because I can instantly show that the information is correct.

That is a huge win for us. When we first rolled it out, I spent a third of my time justifying the numbers. Now, I rarely have to do that. It's all there, and they can see it, so they trust what the information is. If something is wrong, it's not a case of "Why is this being computed wrong?" It's more like: "What didn't report?"

We have 200 stores that communicate to our central hub each night. If one of them doesn't send any data, somebody notices now. That wasn't the case in the past. They're saying, "Was there something wrong with the store?" instead of, "There's something wrong with the data."

With Lumada's single end-to-end data management, we no longer need some of the other tools that we developed in-house. Before that, everything was in-house. We had a build-versus-buy mentality. It simplified many aspects that we were already doing and made that process quicker. It has made a world of difference. 

This is primarily anecdotal, but there were times where I'd get an IM from one of the managers saying, "I'm looking at this in the sales meeting and calling out what somebody is saying. I want to make sure that this is what I'm seeing." I made a couple of people mad. Let's say they're no longer working for us, and we'll leave it at that. If you're not making somebody mad, you're not doing BI right. You're not asking the right questions.

Having a single platform for data management experience is crucial for me. It lets me know when something goes wrong from a data standpoint. I know when a load fails due to bad data and don't need to hunt for it. I've got a status board, so I can say, "Everything looks good this morning." I don't have to dig into it, and that has made my job easier. 

What's more, I don't waste time arguing about why the numbers on this report don't match the ones on another because it's all coming from the same place. Before, they were coming from various places, and they wouldn't match for whatever reason. Maybe there's some piece of code in one report that isn't being accounted for in the other. Now, they're all coming from the same place. So everything is on the same level.

I'm a database guy, not a programmer, so Lumada's ability to create low-code pipelines without custom coding is crucial for me. I don't need to do any Java customization. I've had to write SQL scripts and occasionally a Javascript within it, but those are few and far between. I can do everything else within the tool itself. I got into databases because I was sick and tired of getting errors when I compiled something. 

Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying. That's the one issue, but I see the limitation, and it might not be easily solvable. 

I started working with Lumada long before it was acquired by Hitachi. It's been about 11 years now. I'm the primary person in the company who works with it. A few people know the solution tangentially. Aside from very basic elements, most tasks related to Lumada usually fall in my lap.

Lumada's stability and performance are pretty good. The limitations I run into are usually with the database that I'm trying to write to rather than read from. The only time I have a real issue is when an incredibly complex query takes 20 minutes to start returning data. It's sitting there going, "All right. Give me something to do." But then again, I've got it running on a machine that's got 64 gigs of memory.

Scaling out our processes hasn't been a big deal. We're a relatively small shop with only a couple of production databases. We're more of a regional enterprise, and I haven't had any issues with performance yet. It's always been some other product or solution that has gotten in the way. Lumada can handle anything we throw at it. Every night I run reports on our part ledger. That includes 200 million records, and Lumada can chew through it in about an hour and a half. 

I know we can extend processing into the Spark realm if we need to. We've thought about that but never really needed it. It's something we keep in our back pocket. Someone suggested trying it out, but it never really got off the ground because other more pressing needs came up. From what I've seen, it'll scale out to whatever I need it to do. Any limitations are in the backend rather than the software. I've done some metrics on it. It's the database that I have to wait on more than the software. It's not doing a whole lot CPU-wise. My limitations are elsewhere, usually.

Right now, we have about 100 users working with Lumada. About 100 people log in to the system, but probably 200 people get reports from it. Only about 50 use the analysis tools, including the top sales managers and all of the buying group. There are also some analysts from various groups who use it constantly. 

I'd give Lumada support a nine out of 10. It has been exceptional historically, but there was a rough patch about a year and a half ago shortly after Hitachi took over. They were in a transition period, but it has been very responsive since. I usually don't need help. When I do, I get a response the same day, and somebody's working on it. I'm not too worried about things going wrong, like an outage. I've never had that happen.

Sometimes when we do upgrades, and I'm in my test environment, I'll contact them and say, "I ran into this weird issue, and it's not doing what it should. What do you make of it?" They'll tell me, "You got to do this, that, and the other thing." They've been good about it.

Before Lumada, we had a variety of homegrown solutions. Most of it was centered on our warehouse management system because that was our primary focus. There were also reports within the point of sale system, and the two never crossed paths. Now they're integrated. There was also an analysis tool they had before I came on board. I can't remember the name of it. The company had something, but it didn't do what they thought it would do, and the project fizzled.

Part of the problem was that they didn't have somebody in-house who understood business intelligence until they brought me on. They were very operationally focused before that. The management was like, "We need more insight into what we're doing and how we're doing it." That was phase two of the big data warehouse push. The management here is relatively conservative in that regard, so they're somewhat slow to say, "Hey. We need to do something along these lines." But when they decide to go, get out of the way because here we come.

I used a different tool at my previous job called Informatica. Lumada has less of a learning curve for deployment. Lumada was similar enough to Informatica that it's like, "Okay. This makes sense," but there were a few differences. Once I figured out the difference, it made a lot of sense to me. The entire chain of steps Lumada allows you to do is intuitive.

Informatica was a lot more tedious to use. You had to hook every column up from its source to its target. With Lumada, it's the name that matters and its position. It made aspects a whole lot easier and less tedious. Every so often, it bites me in the butt. If I get a column out of order, it'll let me know I did something wrong. But it's much less error-prone because I don't have to hook every column up from its source to its target anymore. With Informatica, there were times where I spent 20 minutes just sitting there trying not to drool on myself. It was terrible. 

Setting up Lumada was pretty straightforward. We just rolled it out and went from proof of concept to live in about a year. I was relatively new to the organization at the time and was still getting a feel for it — knowing where data was and what all these things mean. My experience at a shoe company didn't exactly translate to an auto parts business. I went to classes down in Orlando to learn the product, then we went from there and just tried it. We had a few faux pas here and there, but we knew.

Lumada has also significantly reduced our ETL development time. It depends on the project, but if someone comes to me with a new data source, I can typically integrate it within a week, whereas it used to take a month. It's a 4-to-1 reduction. It's allowed our IT department to stay lean. I worked at another company with 70 IT people, 50 of which were programmers. My current workplace has 12 people, and six are programmers. The others are UI-type developers, and there are about six database people, including me. We save the equivalent of a full-time employee, so that's anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 a year.

I think Lumada's price is fair compared to some of the others, like BusinessObjects, which is was the other solution that I used at my previous job. BusinessObject's price was more reasonable before SAP acquired it. They jacked the price up significantly. Oracle's OBIEE tool was also prohibitively expensive. We felt the value was much greater than the cost, and the value for the money was much better than if we had gone with other solutions.

We didn't consider other options besides Lumada because we are members of an auto parts trade association, and they were using the Pentaho tool before it was Hitachi to do some ETL tasks. They recommended it, so we started using it. I evaluated a couple of other ones, but they cost more than we were willing to spend to try out this type of solution. Once we figured out what it could do for us, then it's like, "Okay. Now, we can do some real work here."

I rate Lumada nine out of 10. The aspect I like about Lumada is its flexibility. I can make it do pretty much whatever I want. It's not perfect, but I haven't run into a tool that is yet. I haven't used every aspect of it, but there's very little that I can't make it do. I haven't run into a scenario where it couldn't handle a challenge we put in front of it. It's been a solid performer for us. I rarely have a problem that is due to Lumada. The issues I have with my loads are never because of the software.

If you plan to implement Lumada, I recommend going to the classes. Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions of support because many of them used to be consultants. They've all been there, done that. One of the guys I talk to regularly lives about 80 miles to the north of me. I have a rapport with him. They're willing to go above and beyond to make you successful.

I still use this tool on a daily basis. Comparing it to my experience with other ETL tools, the system I created using this tool was quite straightforward. It involves extracting data from MySQL, exporting it to CSV, storing it on S3, and then loading it into Redshift.

The PDI Kettle Job and Kettle Transformation are bundled by a shell script, then scheduled and orchestrated by Jenkins.

We continue to use this tool primarily because many of our legacy systems still rely on it. However, our new solution is mostly based on Airflow, and we are currently in the transition phase. Airflow is a data orchestration tool that predominantly uses Python for ETL processes, scheduling, and issue monitoring—all within a unified system.

In my current company, this solution has a limited impact as we predominantly employ it for handling older and simpler ETL tasks.

While it serves well in setting up ETL tools on our dashboard, its functionalities can now be found in several other tools available in the market. Consequently, we are planning a complete transition to Airflow, a more versatile and scalable platform. This shift is scheduled to be implemented over the next six months, aiming to enhance our ETL capabilities and align with modern data management practices.

This solution offers drag-and-drop tools with a minimal script. Even if you do not come from an IT background or have no software engineering experience, it is possible to use. It is quite intuitive, allowing you to drag and drop many functions.

The abstraction is quite good.

If you're familiar with the product itself, it has transformational abstractions and job abstractions. We can create smaller transformations in the Kettle transformation and larger ones in the Kettle job. Whether you're familiar with Python or have no scripting background at all, the product is useful.

For larger data, we use Spark.

The solution enables us to create pipelines with minimal manual or custom coding efforts. Even without advanced scripting experience, it is possible to create ETL tools. I recently trained a graduate from a management major who had no experience with SQL. Within three months, he became quite fluent, despite having no prior experience using ETL tools.

The importance of handling pipeline creation with minimal coding depends on the team. If we switch to Airflow, more time is needed to teach fluency in the ETL tool. With these product abstractions, I can compress the training time to three months. With Airflow, it would take more than six months to reach the same proficiency.

We use the solution's ability to develop and deploy data pipeline templates and reuse them.

The old system, created by someone prior to me in my organization, is still in use. It was developed a long time ago and is also used for some ad hoc reporting.

The ability to develop and deploy data pipeline templates once and reuse them is crucial to us. There are requests to create pipelines, which I then deploy on our server. The system needs to be robust enough to handle scheduling without failure.

We appreciate the automation. It's hard to imagine how data teams would work if everything were done on an ad hoc basis. Automation is essential. In my organization, 95% of our data distributions are automated, and only 5% are ad hoc. With this solution, we query data manually, process it on spreadsheets, and then distribute it within the organization. Robust automation is key.

We can easily deploy the solution on the cloud, specifically on AWS. I haven't tried it on another server. We deploy it on our AWS EC2, but we develop it on local computers, including both Windows and MacBooks.

I have personally used it on both. Developing on Windows is easier to navigate. On MacBooks, the display becomes problematic when enabling dark mode.

The solution has reduced our ETL development time compared to scripting. However, this largely depends on your experience.

Five years ago, when I had less experience with scripting, I would have definitely used this product over Airflow, as the abstraction is quite intuitive and easier for me to work with. Back then, I would have chosen this product over other tools that use pure scripting, as it would have significantly reduced the time required to develop ETL tools. However, this is no longer the case, as I now have more familiarity with scripting.

When I first joined my organization, I was still using Windows. Developing the ETL system on Windows is quite straightforward. However, when I switched to a MacBook, it became quite a hassle. To open the application, we had to first open the terminal, navigate to the solution's directory, and then run the executable file. Additionally, the display becomes quite problematic when dark mode is enabled on a MacBook.

Therefore, developing on a MacBook is quite a hassle, whereas developing on Windows is not much different from using other ETL tools on the market, like SQL Server Integration Services, Informatica, etc.

I have been consistently using this tool since I joined my current company, which was approximately one year ago.

The performance is good. I have not tested the product at its bleeding edge. We only perform simple jobs. In terms of data, we extract it from MySQL and export it to CSV. There are only millions of data points, not billions. So far, it has met our expectations and is quite good for a smaller number of data points.

I'm not sure that the product could keep up with significant data growth. It can be useful for millions of data points, but I haven't explored its capability with billions of data points. I think there are better solutions available on the market. This applies to other drag-and-drop ETL tools as well, like SQL Server Integration Services, Informatica, etc.

We don't really use technical support. The current version that we are using is no longer supported by their representatives. We didn't update it yet to the newer version. 

Neutral

We're moving to Airflow. The switch was mostly due to debugging problems. If you're familiar with SQL for integration services, the ETL tools from Microsoft have quite intuitive debugging functions. You can easily identify which transformation has failed or where an error has occurred. However, in our current solution, my colleagues have reported that it is difficult to pinpoint the source of errors directly.

Airflow is highly customizable and not as rigid as our current product. We can deploy simple ETL tools as well as machine learning systems on Airflow. Airflow primarily uses Python, which our team is quite familiar with. Currently, only two out of 27 people on our team handle this solution, so not enough people know how to use it.

There are no separations between the deployment and other teams. Each of our teams acts as individual contributors. We handle the entire implementation process, from face-to-face business meetings, setting timelines, developing the tools, and defining the requirements, to production deployment.

The initial setup is straightforward. Currently, the use of version control in our organization is quite loose. We are not using any version control software. The way we deploy it is as simple as putting the Kettle transformation file onto our EC2 server and overwriting the old file, that's it.

I'm not really sure about the pricing of the product. I'm not involved in procurement or commissioning.

We put it on our AWS EC2 server; however, during development, it was on our local server. We deploy it onto our EC2 server. We bundle it in our shell scripts, and the shell scripts are run by Jenkins.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.