SSIS Reviews

The solution is primarily used for the ETL process. Another use case is transforming data from one format to another format.

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

There are a lot of connectors that are not available right now. Some third-party connectors and adapters are available, but not directly from Microsoft data, which is an issue. And in terms of maturity, it is a good product. But, again, the way the industry uses these ETL tools, SSIS is not preferred because of many factors. Microsoft is no longer promoting the tool itself and is more focused on its cloud framework. That could be one of the reasons, but a smaller company prefers to SSIS because it is usually free with the SQL Server.

There are a lot of things that Microsoft could improve in relation to SSIS. One major problem we faced was when attempting to move some Excel files to our SQL Server. The Excel provider has a limitation that prevents importing more than 255 columns from a particular Excel file to the database. This restriction posed a significant issue for us, and as a workaround, we had to convert the files to CSV format before importing them. While it involved some manual effort, it was not a big deal since it was a one-time task. These are some small areas of improvement. There's one tool, a very famous and popular tool among banking clients, that supports this kind of data load in SSIS. 

Moreover, in the case of a pivot, which is available in your Excel, there are a lot of ways an Excel file can be created, and you can have a favorite kind of data format in Excel. Importing data of that kind into SSIS can be problematic, and it cannot be done easily. It requires writing some sort of custom code. These basic issues need improvements. 

However, I don't think Microsoft would be willing to make any modifications to the existing capabilities provided by the tool. The reason is that there are already many third-party vendors offering similar functionality through their plugins. 

For example, you can install these plugins within your Visual Studio, and they provide an extra set of features integrated into Visual Studio and SSIS. Perhaps that's why Microsoft has stopped actively improving upon certain features. But, again, this introduces an overhead in terms of development cost. To access additional tools or features, I have to purchase them from another vendor and then implement them. 

Moreover, if something is not directly supported by Microsoft and relies on third-party tools, it can become a significant issue, as I'll have to depend on those vendors, which poses another challenge.

I have been using SSIS for more than 12 years.

The solution is pretty mature.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

We have never faced any significant issues as long as your underlying hardware has a good amount of resources.

Scalability depends on the kind of workload and implementation you are giving to SSIS.

It is best suited for small and medium. However, for enterprises, it depends on the specific implementation they require. Real-time scenarios might not be the best fit, but for batch processing, it can still be suitable.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. It essentially gives most of the small and medium use cases, you will be easily able to implement and scale SSIS.

It is very difficult to get support from Microsoft. They will support you till they're getting paid. Microsoft is not interested in support in case of a small issue or help. It is very difficult to get support directly from Microsoft.

When it comes to ease of use, SSIS has an advantage over a tool called Informatica, which is also an ETL tool I've worked with. SSIS is more developer-friendly, even though Informatica provides GUI support. However, SSIS has a wider range of connectors compared to Informatica, making it easier to perform various transformations within the server itself. 

On the other hand, Informatica's repository feature is quite robust. SSIS has a repository feature but doesn't have its own implementation. To use a repository feature like DFS, Azure DevOps, or SVN, you need to purchase extra licenses and integrate them into your solution.

The initial setup was pretty simple. To install the SQL Server, select the feature during installation on the same server. In the case of a separate server, opt for SSIS service installation instead of installing the SQL Server, and it will be pretty quick. You can have your server up and running within ten minutes.

The solution is economical. It comes free with the SQL Server. You don't have to worry about the pricing as long as you're installing both services on the same server.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. There is room for improvement.

SSIS' most valuable feature is its reporting services.

SSIS sometimes hangs, and there are some problems with servers going down after they've been patched.

I've been using SSIS for over eight years.

SSIS' stability is fairly good, but there's room for improvement.

The initial setup was pretty simple.

SSIS is fairly well-priced - I would rate it at four out of five.

SSIS is best suited for small and medium companies. I would rate SSIS eight out of ten.

This is an infrastructure tool and our primary use case is for data warehouse integration.

The solution has enabled us to perform tasks more quickly.

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

I haven't found too many successful scaling options and that's something that could be improved.

I've been using this solution for over 10 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution could be more scalable. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment took a day and we did it in-house. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

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.

I would like to see more features in terms of the integration with Azure Data Factory.

I've worked with this solution for about four years, on both the on-premises and cloud solutions. We had around 3000 plus users.

It's a stable solution.

Technical support is not efficient, and I've had to search on the web to solve the problems.

I worked on PowerCenter.

The initial setup is straightforward and is not complex. It took about a day to install.

You would need two to three technical staff for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We used an integrator for the deployment process.

SSIS is a cheaper option compared to the cost of other ETL tools.

SSIS is a cheaper solution, and I would recommend it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at seven.

We use SSIS to integrate investment data we collect from different places into our portfolio management system. We get results out of portfolio management systems and integrate that into the downstream back-office, risk, and regulatory reporting systems. All the developers at my company use it. 

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.

It's difficult to refactor SSIS. It gets cumbersome to reuse the solution. 

I have used SSIS off and on for maybe 15 years.

SSIS is stable. 

SSIS scales well

I've never had any issues with SSIS, but I'm not responsible for managing the solution at an enterprise level.

I've used free solutions or ones that allow you to create your own. I've used free ones like KNIME, etc. The open-source solutions have similar features, but I haven't found one with the same ease of use.

I've never had to install SSIS at an enterprise level, but the installation is straightforward for development purposes. It takes less than an hour. However, installing it at the enterprise level would require a lot more configuration, tuning, etc. I'll leave that to the experts.

We pay for a license, and I think SSIS is priced about right. 

I rate SSIS nine out of 10. 

We have data that needs to be migrated. There is also a scan inventory. We create web data, pull it, search it, and then find answers and report stakeholders. So for this process, we use the SSIS.

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.

Sometimes we need to connect to AWS to get additional data sources, so we have to install some external LAN and not a regular RDBMS. We need external tools to connect. It would be great if SSIS included these tools. I'd also like some additional features for row indexing and data conversion. 

We've been using SSIS for about four and a half years. 

If you run SSIS from the local system, it will lag, but it will work properly if you host on the cloud somewhere. It's a headache every time you run this locally.

Almost 10 percent of our users work with SSIS. It's more than a hundred. 

We haven't had that many problems. I have interacted with Microsoft support for some things, but it was a few minor issues. And with the updated VPA, it has been clear. I was satisfied with the support. We don't need support for these types of issues. We don't need to contact the support team or stop our business. 

The initial setup is never a complex process because the interface is user-friendly. If you are working with complex situations, then it can get complicated. We have a DBA team to handle the deployment. We must follow a process to deploy, so we need to get approval whenever there is a change. It's not easy for us, but it's still good, and it doesn't take much time. 

SSIS is on the cheaper side. In terms of value for the money, rivals are offering more database formats and cost processing, so SQL is lagging somewhat. 

I rate SSIS eight out of 10. I recommend it. 

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.

The solution could improve on integrating with other types of data sources. We had issues with connecting to Oracle, it did not do as good of a job as it did with SQL servers. 

In my experience, more efficiency is needed when it comes to dealing with huge volumes of data. However, this is also dependant on the server capacity.

In an upcoming release, they should update the features to facilitate efficient data transfers. 

I have been using the solution for approximately 10 years.

We have not experienced any behavioural differences with the operations of the solution, it is stable.

We typically implement the solution for enterprise-size companies.

The installation was easy.

It would be beneficial if the solution had a less costly cloud offering.

Informatica and Talent, are two options I am currently evaluating.

Customers have moved on pass SSIS and use Azure Data Factory, Databricks or something similar. We have a few of our customers looking to moving on to Informatica or Talent. This is how I was led to itcentralstation.com, to learn more about SSIS and how it was compared to Informatica. 

I have never had a situation where a particular transformation was not possible in SSIS. We have always been able to meet the demands of our need with SSIS.

I rate SSIS an eight out of ten.

I'm using the solution primarily for e-memory and e-database calculation, mostly data blending (ETL) and massive table joining, etc. I also use it for data preparation and modeling.

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.  

The solution should work on the GPU, graphical processing unit. There should also be a piping integration available.

The design of the dashboard isn't great, visually, but the solution works, so this isn't so important to me.

SSIS's competitor, Autonomous Database by Oracle, offers you, depending on the performance of the server, new hardware, should you update your software. It advises you on how to optimize your system. It's AI and works as an artificial database manager. Microsoft doesn't have anything like this yet, but it would be nice if they did.

The stability of the solution is perfect.

The solution is very scalable. We have approximately 25-30 users for the on-premises version, and our cloud version has around 5,000 users.

We don't ask for much from technical support. We utilize community information, and source answers via the internet or online user information. I do find that communicating with Oracle is much better.

We previously used Oracle as an integration tool, but it's much more expensive than Microsoft.

The initial setup was easy.

We had a consultant that assisted us with the implementation.

I use the private cloud as well as the on-premises version of the solution.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. I would rate it higher if the solution offered full automation AI for database managing, setup and management, and scaling of the solution.