SSIS Reviews

The primary use case for this solution varies according to the customer, but it typically involves moving data from OLTP systems into a data warehouse and/or data marts.

This solution has provided an inexpensive tool and it is easy to find experienced developers.

The most valuable features are the relatively short learning curve, and the automation capabilities provided through the BIML add-in for SSDT.

The UI could use refinement. I would like to see more standard components out of the box, such as SFTP, and data compression components.

More than five years.

Movement of data and creation of files. ALl the typical things that you would have a ETL solution do. Data movements were in the millions and no calculations were completed. This means it was always a select * from where ever it was coming from and going to. Light translations like concatenation was being used. 

SSIS was easily adaptable to our group. It was cheaper than the other tools that we compared it to, however I feel that we got what we paid for.

The packaging and how it is organized is good for someone that really has never seen ETL before. 

Scalability of SSIS needs some improvement. Seems to get sluggish as soon as we hit a high volume of data.

Still implementing.

Again it failed a lot and by a lot I mean every day. The failures were false alarms and caused many sleepless night for our company that I used to work for.

SSIS is good for smaller shops that don't really have a high volume of data.

I would rate the customer service as poor. 

We were using Hyperion Application Link. We switched because HAL was being sunset.

Never participated in the initial setup.

In-house.

For the money, it's a decent tool. However, if the budget was larger I would have gone with a different tool

Look at how this product is sold to you. Ask yourself, am I getting everything that I need. Its more expensive to get the additional adapters after the fact.

We looked at ODI, Informatica, and DataStage. All three we had in-house. ODI was the better option and after dealing with SSIS for only a few months, we ended up using ODI.

SSIS is a very flexible solution that allows data to be generated through code or external software. As a result, we can create reproducible patterns and improve code quality.

Because of the code generation, code quality improved and the time to develop decreased. This led to a quicker and more agile development phase.

It has the ability to be deployed into the cloud through Data Factory, and run completely as a software as a service in the cloud.

Metadata management. A change in the metadata source cripples the whole ETL process, requiring each module to be manually reopened.

More than five years.

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.

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.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

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

The setup is straightforward.

We looked at Informatica and DataStage.

Don't worry, go ahead.

• 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)

• 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

• 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

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

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

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.

-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.

Been using it for 5 years now.

Scalability not on the same level as with IBM Datastage.

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

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.

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.

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.