SAP Data Services Reviews

SAP ERP and Salesforce.com integration.

We now have a single ETL tool for all data integration.

Technical Support; platform and database version support.

No.

Yes, with some of the SAP extractors.

No.

Fair.

Not good enough.

Yes. We previously used Microsoft SSIS, but found this a poor solution for our environment. It lacked strong integration with SAP or Salesforce and had extremely limited support for web services.

Initial setup was fairly simple.

In-house.

Estimate this saves us 2 headcount.

Only Microsoft.

Data Quality and ETL. The product has fantastic data quality options and matching/consolidation features. The ETL is very powerful and easy to use.

We were able to increase data quality on the back-end. We didn't have great front-end capture. We are also able to add additional data sources very easily.

Error logging is very cryptic. Embedded Data flows are only customizable on either input or output, not both.

5 Years

No

Sometimes with complex data flows. But generally a stable product.

No. We had a very good admin. Scalability requires a lot of product knowledge.

Same as most large companies. Ok.

Ok. We had the benefit of a Platinum consultant on the project so he was able to escalate issues easily.

Wasn't personally involved, but was straightforward for the development environment. Production was more complex.

In-house. We had an expert.

Don't remember exact ROI, but saved many hours in development and maintenance by using the tool.

Informatica. Wasn't as easy to use as Data Services and the data quality was not as robust.

We use this solution for the EPL, extraction form, and low data.

I appreciate having access to the SAP data.

It would be nice if this solution was a bit easier to move from development to production.

I have been using SAP for ten years.

The initial setup was straightforward and took about a day.

There is a one time purchase fee plus annual maintenance.

Once you have training on the solution, it is very important to explore the full potential of the product rather than jumping right into development.

This is a nine out of ten solution.

The graphical user interface and powerful SQL generation capabilities make the coding of ETL flows very easy and efficient. The ability to easily run processes in parallel or sequentially is also very valuable. Overall the ease of use is Data Services key benefit.

While Data Services performs very well when dealing with relational structures and to a lesser degree with delimited files, there is significant room from improvement with the integration with web services and related data formats (XML, JSON, etc.). We have had to code our own ETL processes in Python or Java to extract data from all but the simplest web services.

Three years.

If you have a need to access non-relational data sources, review the tool’s capabilities for your specific use cases very carefully.

Scalability and easy to use.

There are a lot of version improvements in the years and makes it hard to sync up with older versions of the same tool.

1 Year.

It is very stable and doesn't crash easily.

Nope.

On a Scale of 1-5, I would give them 3.

On a Scale of 1-5, I would give them 3.

It was already setup on the client system. I used it just for ETL purpose.

Pretty Good

Its a very great tool to be used for ETL process. It has support for all the databases and in most cases, it generates SQL by itself which is a big help for beginners.

Lineage analysis where used, export options, custom functions, connectivity to Business Warehouse (BW).

Fast data load to BW PSA, more integration options between different DBs.

Connections to DBs (datastores), unusual behavior of temp. and permanent tables that just get corrupted sometimes and only solution is to recreate them or re-import from data store.

1 year.

Sudden crashing of DS making unsaved changes lost, happens usually when logged in for a long amount of time.

Nope, its good in extending the features in terms of DWH scalability.

Good support is available via consultants.

Previously BW was being used, but is was a closed system , we had new source application which contained information in oracle and SQL DBs, and BW wasn't very good at loading the data in schedules.

Nope, because of its connectivity to BW it was choosen

Friendly interface and online jobs.

It gave us an easy way to collect different data sources into an analytic DB.

3 years.

It is straightforward.

I did it.

It's a good product which does not require deep knowledge of programming and integrates well with SAP othet products.

Data Quality Transforms, Data Cleanse, Platform, Match.

Doing De-Deduplication of data for Data Cleansing is much easier and has been revolutionised with Data Services. Especially used in conjunction with SAP Information Stewards.

It needs a Web-client.

2 years.

Sometimes when re-installing the product, the program corrupts and needs to be completely removed. Its wastes a lot of time.

None

Sometimes when upgrading the product, the program corrupts and needs to be completely removed. Its wastes a lot of time.

It could be better.

Could also be better. There are still a few niggles that need to be sorted out and it seems that SAP are a bit slow on the comeback.

SSIS. I switched because a) my current company specialises in Data Services and b) because DS is the best tool for working with SAP ERP and SAP Hana.

Straight forward.

In-house.

SSIS only.

Prepare well, read the installation guide and make sure you have all the boxes ticked before going ahead and installing.