IBM InfoSphere DataStage Reviews

We use it for many kinds of projects. For example, we use it for business intelligence, master data management, data quality, data governance, data integration to SAP, Oracle retail, and real-time integration.

The concept of integration is a valuable feature of the product. The product excels in this area. In fact, it is one of the two leading products in the integration field. 

Based on my experience, interacting with data through integration has been more profitable than any other products or projects. Data integration is a reliable feature.

The graphical user interface (GUI) feels a lot like the interfaces from the 1980s. Regarding IBM, they initially indicated that version 8.11.7 would be their final release. We require more connectors to establish clear connections to cloud services. Connecting to the cloud is not easy or transparent within the product. Although the product has the potential to connect to the cloud, configuring and setting it up is challenging.

In future releases, connecting to the cloud should be easy and transparent.

I’ve been using this solution since 2005. I’m currently using version 11.7.

The stability of the solution is ten on ten.

The scalability of the solution is nine on ten.

Setting up the system is difficult and requires a lot of technical expertise. It demands a high level of experience during the setup process. 

However, despite the difficulty, our team, possibly the only one in Mexico, is good at quickly completing the setup.

Most of our implementations or installations are on-premises, accounting for approximately 90% of the total. The remaining 10% of our implementations are on the cloud.

The product has proven to be exceptional and highly competitive in the market. As a result, I have experienced substantial financial success with the product. There are many examples we have for the ROI.

The price of the product is reasonable, especially for mid-sized companies. We have been successfully selling to several mid-sized companies.

The market is indeed filled with numerous solutions. Currently, I am exploring Microsoft's offerings, particularly their integration capabilities. Also, the purpose and functionalities of Azure are pretty interesting. I have been working with Quick Link, and specifically, I have been working with Azure Database.

If you want to learn about integrating data, this product offers a valuable learning opportunity. Then you can consider transitioning to the next product in line. The underlying concept remains the same. 

I believe this solution is more reliable and provides a better understanding of data integration, data quality management, and master data management. It covers all aspects of data management, making it easier to learn. 

This is my perspective, possibly influenced by my extensive experience working with this product for many years. It is the main strength of this solution.

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

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a core ETL tool. We use it with source systems like mainframes. DataStage is perfectly suited for extracting data from mainframes.

IBM is stable and accurate to monitor. It's easy to understand to monitor the data lineage from source to target.

DataStage is quite expensive. It is too hard to find a consultant using DataStage in Turkey.

I have been using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for three years. I also used this solution for two years back in 2009-10.

The product is stable.

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

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The quality and response time of support is fine. It's pretty quick.

Positive

Informatica is the first choice for me. It's easy to use and not so expensive compared to DataStage.

You install IBM InfoSphere DataStage once you've set it up properly. It's robust and reliable, but initially configuring it can be challenging.

The first consideration is the type of source system they have, whether it is a mainframe or not. Another key indicator for me to suggest DataStage is if the client has other IBM ecosystems, such as data quality or IBM governance tools. This makes it highly suitable because you can easily establish data lineage.

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

Complex data integration projects which require integration from multiple data sources.

I have worked during many implementations using DataStage. All of the projects that I worked on have been successful. This is due mainly to the strict discipline around best practices, and by following a set of standards and templates designed to reduce complexity and improve automation, including strong reference architecture.

• Its parallel processing capability allows you to go through extremely large data sets in no time at all, if you do your job right. 
• Highly customizable: Allowing you to handle multiple data latencies (scheduled batch, on-demand, and real-time) in the same job. 
• High scalability: Start small and go big with the same job. You just need to adjust the configuration file, no need to recompile.
• Strong metadata management: Business, technical, and process metadata can all be managed from a single place.
• Ease of integration with other tool sets: Easily supports APIs (or build your own) to support data streaming (or batched) from other systems.
• Data Quality Management from within the tool: Supporting data sampling, including profiling of data, directly from the development canvas.
  

High-cost of ownership: They could take a page from open source software, such as Talend.

Working with some of the big data components is good, but I can see improvements are needed, such as native support for Spark and HBase.

No issues.

No issues.

Support is always good.

Have used quite a few ETL tools in my job.

• Ab Initio: Even pricier, but has a highly competent ETL tool. It is complete, but hard to use. 
• Informatica: Not as flexible and does not support the same level of complexity in its maps.
• Talend: It is a good tool suite, extensive, but can be cumbersome to cite all its pieces.
• ODI: For the Oracle centric world.
• SSIS: Week when compared to any of the above tool sets.

Depends on type of environment that is being installed. I have seen fairly simple to overly complex initial setups due to the environment, not due to the tool.

Both vendor and in-house team implementations:

IBM has top-notch support and tool services along with other partners as well. Depending on the partner, this can go from installation and configuration to solution development, etc.)

Most in-house teams that I have seen tend to have have good developers, but not always good architects. Like most every data integration project, if you do not have a strong architecture, your solution will eventually fail.

Depends on the project.

Have done many ETL tool evaluations based on client requirements. DataStage has always been in the top-three. It may not have been selected due to different weights being used for different sections of the evaluation for different clients, but it has always been in the top-three consistently.

If you have the budget and your solution requires industrial/enterprise strength data integration, this product is always a good choice.

We are a consulting company and we use this solution for our clients. We set up the data for them. We have various healthcare-related information from their vendor and business partners. They have integrated them and get data reports from it.

It improves how our client's organization functions.

We mainly use the designer and developer qualities. We use the basic features that we have.

They have many good features. The Hierarchical Data Stage is good.

The interface needs improvement. The interface in Informatica is easier than in DataStage.

The licensing can be improved. Many companies are moving away from DataStage because it is expensive.

The biggest issue that is unclear is how are they integrating into DevOps when they are binary files.

We would like to see DataStage integrated with DevOps so that a pipeline can be created for auto-deployment. Right now we are all doing it manually.

I have been working with IBM InfoSphere DataStage for seven years.

We have the 11.3 version but have recently migrated to the 11.7 version.

It's a stable product, it's not new.

It's very scalable. Our clients are medium-sized companies with a 1.5 billion turnover.

We reached out to IBM because the file was not readable, and they resolved the issue.

Technical support is good. I have not found any issues with technical support. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

In some cases, they have a delay in giving suggestions for the configuration.

Previously, in another company, I worked with Informatica. There are not a lot of differences but the interface is easier than it is in DataStage.

I don't do the setup, but I think that they have many challenges.

Initially, we had challenges with the configuration. We were trying to use the comparison for Excel, and reading the Excel files from the source, but the files were not readable.

It's very expensive.

I am not a developer, I have a team within our company for that.

There is a cloud migration strategy going on, so they are thinking of moving to the cloud. They want a tool that is not heavy and suitable for their budget.

The recommendation for using this tool would depend on the requirements. 

I don't have anything bad to say about this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for ETL purposes for when we're building data warehouses or data marts. We use it to get the data from different disparate sources, do some ETL on them, and we use DataStage and then load them into the data warehouse, database, or data mart.

This solution used to be on-premises, but they've recently come out with a hybrid offering.

The performance optimization is quite good in DataStage. It provides parallelism and pipelining mechanisms. I have not found those in Informatica or Talend.

As a product, it needs to be more stable. It's a legacy product, so even though it's high-performing, it's not very stable compared to other products like Informatica or Talend. The UI also looks dated.

In the future, I would like to see more integration with cloud technologies. Technical support could be improved.

I've worked with DataStage for about 9 years.

The stability could be better.

It's scalable.

I would rate technical support 6 out of 10.

For the on-prem solution, it was moderately complex. I'm not sure about the hybrid version.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

We migrate data from old databases to new databases. 

We can view what we want to do. We can transform data and put them on tables. 

I want the tool to continue with the on-prem version, not the cloud one. 

I have been using the solution for six years. 

I rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. 

My company has 12 users for IBM InfoSphere DataStage. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten. 

It takes time to get answers from the support. The responsiveness varies. Sometimes it is fast, and other times it is slow. 

Neutral

IBM has good installation documents. The tool's deployment took a day to complete. 

As part of the tool's maintenance, we install the updates and take backups. We rely on two engineers to help with the process.  I rate IBM InfoSphere DataStage an eight out of ten. 

We started using this solution as we needed a system upgrade. We had to move the Db2 data to a AS400 system. 

Their web interface is good but the on-prem sites are outdated. The solution could also be improved if they could integrate the data pipeline scheduling part of their interface. 

We have been using this solution for a couple of months.

This is a scalable solution. 

When we have needed help from the IBM team, they were helpful. Our company is a premium partner so we get fast responses. 

Positive

The infrastructure and the software configuration part was done by one of my teammates. We were able to complete it in two working days. This was only for the installation of DataStage. 

I would advise others to identify the communication between servers and the client tools correctly. If working from a client environment and connecting to the server, configuration should be done correctly, otherwise you may encounter some issues.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

DataStage itself is a very powerful tool and you have a lot of transformations that you can do. In comparison to Informatica, you can run very complex transactions on it. It's a precise and powerful environment. And when you have ETLs and you all your data documented on the data manager and you have the rest of management from IBM itself on InfoSphere, it's very powerful, especially when you use the whole suite. It helps with end-user technologies and gives you better imaging. 

It's powerful in administration mode. It works well when you're using solutions like DataConnect, IBM CDC, etc.

DataStage works better with Linux operating systems when the application services are hosted on a Linux system equipment, but it's powerful on Windows too.

Also, no matter what language you use, you can always transform the data.

I'm not sure about the latest versions, however, as I'm on 11.3, which is about five years old.

I really like this tool, but the administration should be on the same client application because a lot of administration features are not on the client-side, and they usually need to have administrative access. It's quite complicated to force IT, teams, to have separate administrative access from the developers. 

The platform also needs more stability. It caches a lot. It crashes on the application servers that the host allows on the platform.

The solution needs better online tools for data, or for sourcing data on the internet. They have InfoSphere exchange but it's not as useful for DataStage. 

The stability is related to the operating system your company uses. It crashes occasionally when you're hosting the application servers, but only in the servers on the operating system. With Linux, because Linux itself is very robust, it crashes less. For example, we have a telecom with 40 million users and using Linux it crashed maybe two times a year. However, when the solution was hosted on the Windows platform, it crashed two to three times a month. 

The crashes are related to memory and if it's not automated, you have to deal with it manually. On Windows, you have to release the cache memories manually, but on Linux, you don't have to do that, which is why you get less crashing. 

The solution is very scalable, but at a certain point, it consumes a lot of resources. In order to scale, you need a lot of memory and a lot of people.

The quality of technical support you can expect usually depends on the region. In Egypt, it was not great, but in Jordan, Dubai, and Kuwait, it was good. That was a couple of years ago. I'm not using the solution right now, so I can't say for sure if this is still the case.

The solution has one of the most straightforward setups. It's even easier than Office.

The last version I interacted with was 11.3 because the later versions were cloud-based and usually our customers didn't want to use the solution on the cloud.

In terms of advice, I would give to anyone trying to implement the solution is this: you to have accurate sizing. Clients always do the sizing wrong and they need more experience to get the sizing right. Setting up the environments takes sizing into account but it usually makes a lot of problems if the sizing is poor when it starts to operate. Then you have re-implement and it will require an increase in resources that will change your budget. 

I would rate this solution nine out of ten.