IBM InfoSphere DataStage Reviews

The product is primarily used for  intense data transformation; it's part of the risk management, and dataflow, and is sourcing data from the data warehouse on the SAP Sybase platform.

The connectivity with the databases and the speed and flexibility of modeling is excellent. We like the flexibility of modeling.

The solution is stable.

It can scale.

We'd like better integration with source control and error and diagnostic information. The error messaging needs to be improved. 

The solution is a bit complicated. 

I've been using the solution for four years. 

It's stable. it's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We can scale the solution as needed. 

There are about 50 users on the solution right now. 

While technical support may have been used, I have never personally dealt with them.

I've used SSIS as well and find this product to be more difficult to set up.

The initial setup can be challenging. It's harder to set up than, for example, SSIS.

I'm not sure how long it took to set up, as it was already in place when I joined the team. However, I would say it took a week to deploy.

We have five people on hand that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. They are all engineers. 

The initial setup can be handled in-house. 

The licensing we have is permanent. 

I'd recommend the product to others. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. We've been pleased with its capabilities overall. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

This solution has an end-to-end process used for data integration.

It's a robust solution.

The initial setup could be more straightforward.

We have been providing IBM InfoSphere DataStage for one year.

I believe this solution is stable. We have not received any feedback from our clients.

To my understanding, this solution is scalable.

We have several customers who are currently using it.

I have not contacted technical support.

We have a long list of different providers such as Informatica, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft SSIS, Pentaho, and Talend.

The installation was not straightforward and I would rate it at medium complexity.

The installation required assistance from an expert from IBM.

The price is expensive but there are no licensing fees.

Informatica provides a cloud-based deployment but we only work with the on-premises version. This is a product that I can recommend.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I work as a consultant and I have several projects with the Russian banks. My main expertise is building data warehouses and I use the product as a ETL. 

I am impressed with the tool's ETL tracing. 

It would be great if they can include some basic version of data quality checking features. 

The solution is quite stable. 

I would rate the product's scalability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. You need to get a balance between batch ETL processing and streaming. 

We implement this solution for our customers. The majority of them are Enterprise companies.

This solution is very easy to use because you can design to compile and to run.

The most valuable feature is the ability to transfer information via notes.

The documentation and in-application help for this solution need to be improved, especially for new features. By comparison, in Talend, there is help available for all of the features.

One of my clients has a problem using this solution with MongoDB.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see the ability to copy and paste schemas. It would be very good because as it is now, you have to save the schema to a repository and then re-load it. It can be done in Talend, but in DataStage, it is not as good.

This is a stable solution. You have to be careful when you install a service pack because sometimes it causes problems. There may be a second service pack to solve problems that were introduced by the first one.

Scaling this solution is not difficult. When you first install you chose what components you need. My clients are enterprise companies, with at least five hundred or a thousand employees.

The are several technical support teams, and the quality of support depends on where the customer is situated. Normally, technical support answers quickly, but it can be improved.

The initial setup is not easy. You have to be an expert to install DataStage.

Sometimes I get calls from clients who ask me to install this solution because their Unix administrator is not able to do it. You have to configure your OS, Database, Web server, and more. There are a lot of things to install.  

If you are not experienced then it is not possible to install.

Small and medium-sized companies cannot afford to pay for this solution.

This solution is for larger companies. Smaller businesses use Talend.

This is a good product, but there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

There could be more customization options for the product.

We have been using IBM InfoSphere DataStage for 20 years. At present, we are using version 11.7.

I rate IBM InfoSphere DataStage’s stability a five out of ten.

The product is suitable for enterprise companies. We have 100 users for it. I rate the platform’s scalability a seven out of ten. It is easily scalable compared to other systems.

The complexity of the technical support services depends on the contact person. Sometimes, it is a good experience, while sometimes a poor experience communicating with their executives.

Neutral

The product is easy to deploy. I rate the process an eight or nine. The deployment time depends on the specific requirements of customers. It takes approximately three months to complete. It requires a team of five to 100 people to execute it, depending on the company size.

The product is expensive. I rate its pricing a ten out of ten.

I rate IBM InfoSphere DataStage an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this product for data loading. We take data from different applications and databases and put it into our data warehouse. 

The most valuable feature is the data integration for data warehousing.

The response time from support is slow and needs to be improved.

I have been using InfoSphere DataStage for almost eight years.

This is a stable product.

We have almost 30 people who use InfoSphere DataStage.

Technical support can be slow.

This product has a lot of good features.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for ETL jobs and movement of data.

The solution has improved the time it takes to perform tasks related to batch applications.

The parallel job scan has been a very valuable feature.

The solution should be more user-friendly.

The solution is quite stable.

I've never investigated the scalability, but I can say that it only scales on the machine. I can have three machines running in parallel. We have about 20 people using the solution, and they are mostly developers and admins. We mainly use the solution for APL jobs.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give technical support and eight.

We were mostly using ETLs on mainframe jobs.

It's a straightforward process. In terms of deployment from the data stage, it takes about a week.

We use an integrator to assist with implementation.

The advice I would give to others is to make sure they define a framework for development and for management. This could be very useful for the future of the product in the company.

I would rate the entire solution eight out of ten. I really like DataStage. The product fits our requirements perfectly.

We are changing the product now, however, to a cloud-based approach for DataStage.

We use it for creating a pattern for data integration with our data vault. We have also used it for creating APIs.

As a data integration platform, it is easy to use. It is quite robust and useful for volumetric analysis when you have huge volumes of data. We have tested it for up to ten million rows, and it is robust enough to process ten million rows internally with its parallel processing. 

Its error logging mechanism is far simpler and easier to understand than other data integration tools.

The newer version of InfoSphere has the data catalog and IDC lineage. They are helpful in the easy traceability of columns and tables.

Its documentation is not up to the mark. While building APIs, we had a lot of problems trying to get around it because it is not very user-friendly. We tried to get hold of API documentation, but the documentation is not very well thought out. It should be more structured and elaborate.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see good reporting on performance and performance-tuning recommendations that can be based on AI. I would also like to see better data profiling information being reported on InfoSphere.

It was DataStage previously, and then it became InfoSphere. I have used DataStage for ten years and InfoSphere for one year.

It is quite stable. In the newer components of InfoSphere, you have a mapping tool called FastTrack and a metadata generator, which can have issues from time to time, but they get resolved.

It is not that easy to scale on-premises. I have worked on the ones deployed on Windows or Unix, and scalability is often dependent on whether you can add more CPUs or boxes. On the cloud, it would have been easier to scale. However, the current version can only be deployed on Windows or Unix.

I have not been in touch with them recently. Earlier, I was in touch with their technical support and had raised tickets because some weird errors, such as fantom error, were being logged in the error log, which made no sense. We used to get in touch with their support team to understand these.

I have used Informatica and SAS CA. IBM InfoSphere has the highest cost of licensing as compared to others. It is not very widely used, and it is very difficult to find people who have this sort of knowledge. 

The newer version of Informatica is on the cloud and is much more user-friendly than InfoSphere because it provides profiling information in nice graphs and charts. It also provides a lot of templates. For example, if I want to build a whole dimensional kind of structure, Informatica has a template. I just need to use that template. So, the ease of use is far better in Informatica, and it has everything that InfoSphere has. The only thing is that Informatica comes in bundles. That's the reason sometimes organizations don't go for it. For example, the data integration is a separate section, and the data quality is a separate section. They have separate pricing.

The initial setup is quite simple. It didn't take more than half an hour to set it up on my laptop.

I implemented it myself. In terms of maintenance, a particular version might not require any maintenance. There could be bug fixes and minor versions going in for some versions.

It is quite expensive.

I would recommend this solution for large-scale implementation where you need a complex transformation and data integration to happen according to a structured format, either a data vault or a dimension model. It is suitable for big companies because of the cost. It is a very valuable platform for data in large volumes. For small volumes, you have other open-source tools that can do the same thing for you.

I am part of a consultancy, and I have deployed this product for companies. We have five to eight developers. Because InfoSphere is a licensed product, and its licenses cost a lot, there are not many InfoSphere developers.

I would rate IBM InfoSphere DataStage an eight out of ten.