SSIS Reviews and Pricing

RajeshHegde

Assistant Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 25, 2017

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In addition to the ETL challenges, it allows us to do DBA activitities, scripting and many other tasks.

Pros and Cons

"In SSIS, the scope is not only to handle ETL challenges, but it will allow us to do so many other tasks, such as DBA activities, scripting, calling any .exe or scripts, etc."

"SSIS can improve in handling different data sources like Salesforce connectivity, Oracle Cloud's connectivity, etc. Also, handling of the different data types will be a big challenge here; so expecting improvement in these areas."

How has it helped my organization?

For the full version of the SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS and SSRS will come as additional features for free. Hence, my organization need not spend extra money for other ETL, reporting and analysis tools. This can give very good flexibility.

What is most valuable?

In SSIS, the scope is not only to handle ETL challenges, but it will allow us to do so many other tasks, such as DBA activities, scripting, calling any .exe or scripts, etc.

What needs improvement?

SSIS can improve in handling different data sources like Salesforce connectivity, Oracle Cloud's connectivity, etc. Also, handling of the different data types will be a big challenge here; so expecting improvement in these areas.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no stability issues.

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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no scalability issues.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Based on the client's requirements, we switched over to this solution.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is straightforward.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at Informatica and DataStage.

What other advice do I have?

Don't worry, go ahead.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Brian DandeneauBusiness Process and Strategy Specialist Advisor at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

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Sep 4, 2018

Thanks for the review and keep them coming.

I like what you put in here for improvements. However, don't hold your breath for Oracle Cloud integration. Most Oracle ETL/ELT tools don't have direct cloud integration yet and its not on the roadmap for a few years.
V/r,
Brian Dandeneau
CEO Applied Governance

it_user102120

Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 4, 2015

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All the necessary types of enumerators are available, but writing custom components and sharing them across multiple ETL streams is tricky.

Pros and Cons

"Compatibility with the rest of Microsoft BI stack"

"Upgrading is usually painful and time consuming despite what MS says"

Valuable Features:

Compatibility with the rest of Microsoft BI stack
Scripting component which opens unlimited possibilities: by having the full .Net stack/libraries available, if you need a yellow rubber duck to quack every million rows, it will quack
Inter-stream dependency mechanism built directly into the tool; the whole ETL solution can be driven off it without having to employ third party software
Parallel processing of a data flow: let's say there's five steps in the flow and ech step consumes output from the preceding step; once step #1 is completed and its data passed to step #2, the engine will feed the next batch of rows to step #1. Once the first batch of rows reaches the last step, there are five concurrent steps working on five different data sets, maximizing utilization of server resources
All the necessary types of enumerators (files, xml nodes, rows and many more)

Improvements to My Organization:

SSIS packages are stored in XML-like format; we keep them in SVN which makes it very easy to track changes
Built-in dependency tool is really great; you can not only react to success/failure results, but you can evaluate any expression in the flow and execute (or bypass) any components based on the result of that expression. This gives you full control to build decision trees of any complexity

Room for Improvement:

Writing custom components and sharing them across multiple ETL streams is tricky and requires specialistic voodoo knowledge
Make the GUI less eye-candy and more responsive; especially the scripting component needs some TLC regarding UI responsiveness

Initial Setup:

It's easy to deploy, you just need a simple file-copy mechanism that is sufficient for most deployment scenarios.

Other Advice:

The good:

Straightforward, intuitive, quick to learn
Built-in debugger: variables, data viewers, breakpoints - everything you would expect from a modern software development tool
Sleek, snappy UI
Great flexibility with storing and deploying ETL components

The bad:

Third party plug-ins may become incompatible with future versions of SSIS
Upgrading is usually painful and time consuming despite what MS says
Compatibility issues may arise when used with non-Microsoft technologies

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user102120Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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Oct 7, 2015

Thanks Gary. Yes, I am aware of the new SSISDB database and I am slowly migrating some of the projects to it. It is much more convenient, especially the way you can configure your solution on per-environment basis. Plus it is flexible, too. You can have just one instance of the SSISDB database for all your environments or one instance per environment, or even some hybrid mode. You can control and track progress of your executions using purely T-SQL, so lots of goodies. Haven't had a chance to play around with 2016 yet but things seem to be going in the right direction anyway.

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it_user275646

Senior Consultant with 51-200 employees

Sep 23, 2015

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It allows us to add C# or other code into ETL flow, but it doesn't have a built-in version control, so you have to get that from other vendors too (so it lacks support for multiple developers).

Pros and Cons

"Its easy to use, fast to develop."

"Scalability not on the same level as with IBM Datastage."

What is most valuable?

Its easy to use, fast to develop. Quite easy to also add C# or other code into ETL flow. Transfer to production is much faster than for example with IBM Infosphere Datastage, you can just copy the packages. Haven't found bugs much at all. Its license cost is also quite cheap compared to IBM and Informatica offerings. Overall when choosing a new ETL software I would look into SSIS or one of the open source tools.

What needs improvement?

-If you want to connect to SAP for example you have to buy add-in from other company and the same applies to many other sources.

-It doesn't have a built-in version control, so you have to get that from other vendors too (so it lacks support for multiple developers).

-Visual studio crashes sometimes.

-Doesn't have good ELT functionality, though ofcourse one can just do SQL.

-Overall there's many small things that could be done to make development faster and the product is not definitely perfect, but one has to compare to offerings of other vendors, which are not 'perfect' from usability and performance standpoint eather.

For how long have I used the solution?

Been using it for 5 years now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability not on the same level as with IBM Datastage.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Many customers are switching from IBM Datastage to SSIS. Think its the ease of use and license costs.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4014

Developer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Sep 15, 2014

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Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is one of the most effective ETL tools available in the market

Pros and Cons

"Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is one of the most effective ETL tools available in the market."

"Need to improve error logging although it does provide error logs but there is still more room for improvement in this area."

Valuable Features:

Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services provides you the ability to build ETL solutions with very minimum background knowledge. If you are already familiar with DTS packages or fairly new to ETL, it is very easy for you to start with your first assignment using SSIS.Microsoft SSIS not only provides you the traditional ETL tasks for loading data from source to destination, it also provides you the ability to send emails using it and write your custom code using Script task and offers to process SSAS task, which makes it stand out from its competitors.It is specifically designed to provide high data transfer using parallel computational logic.Very easy to configure and deploy and maintenance is very low.

Room for Improvement:

It is unable to provide separate user account for each user like Data Hub. Actually Microsoft SSIS is more designed to build ETL solutions for enterprise level unlike Data Hub where each user can access the database and have their own sets of databases.Need to improve error logging although it does provide error logs but there is still more room for improvement in this area. Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is one of the most effective ETL tools available in the market.Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is very low cost compared to the market’s leader Informatica (Power Center) and almost offers everything you need to build your ETL solution.

Other Advice:

You need to have Microsoft SQL Server (Enterprise Edition) licensed to run Microsoft SSIS on your production environment. Like every other Microsoft product, It offers a very vibrant MSDN community along with Microsoft support staff for assistance.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

GaryMData Architect at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees

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Jan 27, 2016

2016 version due out in a few months is even much better and the first significant upgrade since 2012...if you haven't yet used SSIS I'd wait until 2016 and start there if you can. 2014 is unchanged from 2012.

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it_user91539

Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 20, 2014

SSIS vs. BizTalk - which is best for integration with Dynamics Ax

During the last couple of years, I have integrated data with Dynamics Ax both with SSIS and BizTalk. A common question I'm asked is what is the difference when every thing is possible in SSIS why do we need BizTalk or what does BizTalk provide different from SSIS. So My answer to this question is something like:

Everything that BizTalk provides can be implemented in SSIS. But the major difference is batch processing. Usually SSIS package are used to migrate large set of data or dataset. BizTalk provide the operations to be perform on one message at time or real time processing. Because everything in BizTalk is XML so BizTalk is very slow on large set of data. BizTalk provides large number of adapters, while In SSIS you have to use direct connection by Oldb, or Sql db to communicate with different database and depend on OlDb connections. In BizTalk large number of Adapter provided to communicate which may or may not be depend on OlDB connection. Build in Tracking system (BAM) and its display on BAM portal is also big advantage on SSIS. For this purpose you have to make a custom tracking system in SSIS which require a lot of coding. Third advantage of BizTalk over SSIS is BRE. Business rule engine. BRE provide the condition whose value can be changed and complete follow of BizTalk application. These BRE roles can be used in multiple biztalk application while these functionality can be achieved on config files in SSIS.

In conclusion, when we required less data integration/migration and require complex decision making we used BizTalk. For example we have to implement complex work flow on single record. BizTalk application also used route data, read from one location, transform it and drop on other location. A simple example of this transactional data, when one transaction is occur in one system and its impact or integration will required on other system we will use BizTalk. BizTalk is a rapid development tool as compare to SSIS.

When we have a large sum of data, we require less complexity and requirement of integrated systems are based on Same technology then we have to use SSIS. Usually SSIS is used to migrate or integrate the non-transaction data or step up data. The delay of migration and integration possible or example Batch processing. SSIS is built for ETL process, it is not rapid integration tool.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user173649Database And BI Developer at a tech consulting company

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Dec 18, 2014

But I think the cost is a big factor to go for biztalk or ssis

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it_user91536

Architect at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

Feb 20, 2014

SSIS vs Hadoop

On one corner we have Hadoop, a massively distributed JVM-based data processing engine with a Map & Reduce API and a proven track record in handling huge data-sets. On the other corner we have SSIS, a natively non-distributed ETL engine part of the SQL Server family tool-set with .NET code extensibility features and a drag and drop UI (for the most part anyway). Two sweet technologies, probably shouldn’t be compared to each other but we’re doing it anyway, pitted head to head against a data mapping task to the death (or at least to the recycling of my test VMs)… Now FIGHT!

Recently I have been tasked with building a data processing layer tracking social signals with the following characteristics:

Input data is flat files. Although initially the amount of data might not be classified under “Big Data” per-say, but certainly had the potential to grow very quickly. Files were very small JSON format (1 KB average).
Output data is flat files. Delimited file which will be queried through a Hive Warehouse layer.
Data is only Mapped and not Reduced.Which means data is only extracted from the flat files and processed but never aggregated, and in any case SSIS is not capable of reducing (or aggregating) data in a scale-out architecture without building a custom intermediary layer (such as temporarily placing data in a database).
Data Latency into Hive is of Paramount Importance.

Both technologies are capable of iterating through a large number of flat files, extracting information and building an output, and when we take the Reduce operation out of the equation, we level the playing field and now both technologies can be scaled out, albeit Hadoop in a perhaps more friendly manner.

Although these technologies have a wider application and usage that they might be better suited to, in this experiment I was only interested in performance figures on this basic task.

In order to test these technologies against the mapping task, I have built two test machines, one for SSIS with SQL Server to support the SSIS Catalogue database, and another for a simple 3 node Hadoop cluster, the technical specification for each scenario is as follows:

Integration Service (SSIS)	Hadoop
CPU	4 Cores / Node	2 Cores / Node
RAM	8 GB / Node	3 GB / Node
Nodes	1 VM	3 VMs
OS	Windows Server 2012	CentOS
Edition	SQL Server 2012	Cloudera CDH 4

Although the specifications for each test setup is slightly different, which makes the comparison fairly “unscientific”, the over-all processing resources available for each test scenario should be fairly comparable, with the Hadoop cluster gaining a slight edge in terms of over-all CPU cores and RAM. Besides, we are only looking for a really considerable difference in the result to warrant a favouritism of one technology over the other in this business requirement.

I ran two test scenarios:

Scenario 1: 33,000 small (1KB) JSON input files, each file will have about 5 – 10 values to extract against a key (mapping).
Scenario 2: 33 input files (every 1,000 files in scenario 1 is concatenated)

The results of the test were as follows:

Scenario 1 (33,000)	Scenario 2 (33)
SSIS	14.5 (Min)	3.94 (Sec)
Hadoop Cluster	957 (Min)	134 (Sec)

As can be deduced from the results above, 1 SSIS instance showed up to 66X better performance in handling and processing flat files than the same job running in a Hadoop cluster.

Learnings from SSIS vs Hadoop Test

There are a few key learnings that has been gained by doing this experiment:

Hadoop has a terrible start time when operating on a file, the processing engine could take up-to 5 seconds before it could actually start processing the file, were SSIS takes less than 0.2 of a second. Java has never been a very agile language in my opinion.
Hadoop is not intended to handle a large number of small files, instead try combining smaller files into bigger concatenations. Sometimes it is considerably faster to have a pre-processing step that concatenates files into smaller batches.
Although the number of “Reducers” for a Hadoop job could be easily controlled, it is more difficult to control how many “Mappers” available for a job across the cluster, and Hadoop does not always adhere to the user-set number of Mappers.
Although SSIS outperforms Hadoop by an average of 50X on this simple task, Hadoop scales in a much more user-friendly manner, and allows users to “Reduce” or aggregate the data across all nodes for a particular job, a feature that is not supported by the out-of-the-box Integration Service.
Don’t just jump on new technologies, you need to test it and ensure that it is suitable for your particular business requirement, Hadoop is a great distributed processing engine when used in the correct context. It is too easy these days for managers and BI people to band around the term “Hadoop” for everything “Big Data”, from data processing to warehousing, but you need to take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff.
HDInsight (Microsoft’s Hadoop distribution which runs on Windows and Azure) was another technology that we were investigating at the time, although performance was extremely terrible that it was eliminated from the race fairly quickly.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

GaryMData Architect at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees

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May 5, 2015

Thanks Ibrahim, that's hilarious "Two sweet technologies, probably shouldn’t be compared to each other but we’re doing it anyway" - thanks for doing this comparison! Very nicely written and summarized. Good work.