SSIS Reviews

We are using SSIS for ETL and ELT in a business intelligence context. We bring in data from different sources and use SSIS transform and load it into our intermediate database where we are developing dashboards. There are three people doing configuration and about 50 end-users. 

SSIS provides you with lookup and transformation functions, and you have the flexibility to write your own custom code.

SSIS doesn't have a very good user interface, but if you can work with it, it'll provide you with almost all of the functionality.

We have been using SSIS for four years now.

The SSIS is highly stable, but there are occasional issues with the script component.

SSIS is not that scalable. You can scale it vertically to handle a high load, but it lacks horizontal scalability. 

Microsoft has some support for SSIS, but because the company is increasingly transitioning to the cloud, so these on-prem solutions are becoming obsolete.

The initial setup isn't too difficult, but it's not easy. Sometimes, you may need help from a database administrator to set up the SQL Server Integration Services. It can take almost a day to deploy. 

A database administrator can deploy it alone. You may need another person to develop the packages and set up ETL, so it's you need about two or three people for deployment in all. 

SSIS is included at no additional cost in the SQL Server license.

I rate SSIS seven out of 10. I would recommend using a cloud solution if possible, but if you need an on-prem product, SSIS is a good option. If you want to start using SSIS, there is a learning curve because SSIS isn't an easy solution to use. It's complicated, so you have to learn about the components and their functionalities to use them to meet your requirements. 

We have some business requirements, and we use this solution to create the machine tables, measures and APIs.

It is an easy solution but needs some improvement. The creation of the measure in the DAC's model could be improved.

We have been using this solution for two and a half years, and it is deployed on-premises.

We use this solution with Visual Studio. Sometimes we open certain files without making changes, and it saves the changes. In Visual Studio, while we're using TFS, it is easy to backtrack the changes, and we can undo them. However, those changes are pushed to another server if we are not alert and in a hurry.

It is scalable, and we haven't faced many issues. Sometimes, there are storage issues, but it is more of a DBA problem. We have a team in India and France and four people from the Eurofins team using this solution.

I have personally used the technical support and they are good.

The initial setup was easy, and we also used some YouTube videos for guidance. We use the latest version, and it is based on C Sharp.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, SSIS is good. However, everything is shifting to cloud, and in other organizations, everybody's moving to Azure which is much easier to use. We haven't worked with Azure, so I can't compare it to SSIS at this time.

We use SSIS to integrate investment data we collect from different places into our portfolio management system. We get results out of portfolio management systems and integrate that into the downstream back-office, risk, and regulatory reporting systems. All the developers at my company use it. 

SSIS is an easy way to do data integration from various data sources. It doesn't matter whether it's a database, flat files, XML, or Web API. It can talk to the and join them all together.

It's difficult to refactor SSIS. It gets cumbersome to reuse the solution. 

I have used SSIS off and on for maybe 15 years.

SSIS is stable. 

SSIS scales well

I've never had any issues with SSIS, but I'm not responsible for managing the solution at an enterprise level.

I've used free solutions or ones that allow you to create your own. I've used free ones like KNIME, etc. The open-source solutions have similar features, but I haven't found one with the same ease of use.

I've never had to install SSIS at an enterprise level, but the installation is straightforward for development purposes. It takes less than an hour. However, installing it at the enterprise level would require a lot more configuration, tuning, etc. I'll leave that to the experts.

We pay for a license, and I think SSIS is priced about right. 

I rate SSIS nine out of 10. 

Our company sells contracts when you buy a car. We sell aftermarket insurance for the tyre, wheel, ding, dent, windshield, etc. When somebody buys a contract, we capture all of that data into a legacy database PostgreSQL, and my task is to incorporate that into our financial platform using T-SQL. So, I write queries, procedures, and views. I use SSIS, and I use SSRS. My job is to get the data into our financial system so that we can process claims, payments, cancellations, and refunds.

It's something I needed for bulk imports. I'm not a big fan of it, but I haven't seen anything better.

One of the problems I ran into was that the database that I had had a status. I couldn't always flip the status, so I didn't know what data I already had. I had to use SSIS to grab a bunch of data and check the database to see if I needed to insert it. It works okay, but as I plan better, I'm trying to weed it out. SSIS is a bit prickly because anytime you go and change something, it tends to break. That's because there is metadata behind the tool.

I have a tool called ZappySys. I need that tool to cut down on the complexity of SSIS. That tool really helps with a quick turnaround. I can do things quickly, and I can do things accurately. I can get better reporting on errors.

I'm not a fan of SSIS itself. I would rate out-of-the-box SSIS a four out of 10, but with the ZappySys tool, it is a pretty good solution, and then I would rate it an eight out of 10.

The solution is primarily used for the ETL process. Another use case is transforming data from one format to another format.

The solution is easy to use and developer friendly. Many customizations can be performed with a good grasp of the C# language.

There are a lot of connectors that are not available right now. Some third-party connectors and adapters are available, but not directly from Microsoft data, which is an issue. And in terms of maturity, it is a good product. But, again, the way the industry uses these ETL tools, SSIS is not preferred because of many factors. Microsoft is no longer promoting the tool itself and is more focused on its cloud framework. That could be one of the reasons, but a smaller company prefers to SSIS because it is usually free with the SQL Server.

There are a lot of things that Microsoft could improve in relation to SSIS. One major problem we faced was when attempting to move some Excel files to our SQL Server. The Excel provider has a limitation that prevents importing more than 255 columns from a particular Excel file to the database. This restriction posed a significant issue for us, and as a workaround, we had to convert the files to CSV format before importing them. While it involved some manual effort, it was not a big deal since it was a one-time task. These are some small areas of improvement. There's one tool, a very famous and popular tool among banking clients, that supports this kind of data load in SSIS. 

Moreover, in the case of a pivot, which is available in your Excel, there are a lot of ways an Excel file can be created, and you can have a favorite kind of data format in Excel. Importing data of that kind into SSIS can be problematic, and it cannot be done easily. It requires writing some sort of custom code. These basic issues need improvements. 

However, I don't think Microsoft would be willing to make any modifications to the existing capabilities provided by the tool. The reason is that there are already many third-party vendors offering similar functionality through their plugins. 

For example, you can install these plugins within your Visual Studio, and they provide an extra set of features integrated into Visual Studio and SSIS. Perhaps that's why Microsoft has stopped actively improving upon certain features. But, again, this introduces an overhead in terms of development cost. To access additional tools or features, I have to purchase them from another vendor and then implement them. 

Moreover, if something is not directly supported by Microsoft and relies on third-party tools, it can become a significant issue, as I'll have to depend on those vendors, which poses another challenge.

I have been using SSIS for more than 12 years.

The solution is pretty mature.

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

We have never faced any significant issues as long as your underlying hardware has a good amount of resources.

Scalability depends on the kind of workload and implementation you are giving to SSIS.

It is best suited for small and medium. However, for enterprises, it depends on the specific implementation they require. Real-time scenarios might not be the best fit, but for batch processing, it can still be suitable.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. It essentially gives most of the small and medium use cases, you will be easily able to implement and scale SSIS.

It is very difficult to get support from Microsoft. They will support you till they're getting paid. Microsoft is not interested in support in case of a small issue or help. It is very difficult to get support directly from Microsoft.

When it comes to ease of use, SSIS has an advantage over a tool called Informatica, which is also an ETL tool I've worked with. SSIS is more developer-friendly, even though Informatica provides GUI support. However, SSIS has a wider range of connectors compared to Informatica, making it easier to perform various transformations within the server itself. 

On the other hand, Informatica's repository feature is quite robust. SSIS has a repository feature but doesn't have its own implementation. To use a repository feature like DFS, Azure DevOps, or SVN, you need to purchase extra licenses and integrate them into your solution.

The initial setup was pretty simple. To install the SQL Server, select the feature during installation on the same server. In the case of a separate server, opt for SSIS service installation instead of installing the SQL Server, and it will be pretty quick. You can have your server up and running within ten minutes.

The solution is economical. It comes free with the SQL Server. You don't have to worry about the pricing as long as you're installing both services on the same server.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. There is room for improvement.

We're SSIS for flat file data ingestion. Our data sources are Excel files, but if the data sources are SQL servers, I use store procedures instead of SSIS packages.

SSIS is easy to use. 

SSIS is cumbersome despite its drag-and-drop functionality. For example, let's say I have 50 tables with 30 columns. You need to set a data type for each column and table. That's around 1,500 objects. It gets unwieldy adding validation for every column. Previously, SSIS automatically detected the data type, but I think they removed this feature. It would automatically detect if it's an integer, primary key, or foreign key column. You had fewer problems building the model. 

I have used SSIS for three or four months. 

SSIS is a stable product, but the problem is with the UI you use to build things. If you have it deployed on a virtual machine, everything crashes sometimes. That's one of the significant problems we face with Microsoft products.

We have problems with the ports for the analysis services. If everything is deployed, you need to redeploy. It's hard to scale out. If you plan to scale up, you need to prepare everything correctly from the start. Everything needs to be properly configured and deployed. 

We decided to use SSIS because most developers know SQL Server. If they need to hire data engineers, they can just use generic languages like SQL Portal. You don't need to know Talend or other data warehouses and database engines. They prefer SQL Server because that's the most common product.

Setting up SSIS is difficult. I rate it seven out of 10 for ease of setup. It takes around a week to setup a simple data warehouse with three tables. 

I rate SSIS six out of 10. SSIS can get the job done for bigger datasets. However, SQL Server lags if you're working with more than a terabyte or petabyte of data. I recommend exploring the tool because most of the video tutorials on the internet are outdated, and the official Microsoft documentation is geared toward advanced users. Beginners will have a hard time. You need a senior engineer to teach you, or you must explore the tool on your own.

SSIS' most valuable feature is its reporting services.

SSIS sometimes hangs, and there are some problems with servers going down after they've been patched.

I've been using SSIS for over eight years.

SSIS' stability is fairly good, but there's room for improvement.

The initial setup was pretty simple.

SSIS is fairly well-priced - I would rate it at four out of five.

SSIS is best suited for small and medium companies. I would rate SSIS eight out of ten.

I was using the solution to implement some business logic. What we do with the data collected is, for example, use it with Excel and some other databases. We do write our own logic to input the data into the SQL server. We'll be taking inputs and putting them into our business logic.

It is a very helpful tool to integrate. We can have our logic ready by putting data from different data sources, and based on our business requirements, we can have the logic created with the help of the SSIS package.

It allows us to use our own logic. We can create our own packages where it can help us to define the business logic.

It is easy to set up. The deployment is also very quick.

It is stable and reliable. 

The product is scalable. 

There aren't any improvements that are required for SSIS at the moment.

We'd like better data lake architecture so we can move SSIS to the data lake if necessary. Involving a data lake or data engineering aspects would be useful. While it is there, we need more features included. 

I've been using the solution for almost six years. 

The solution is stable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

This is a very scalable product. You can expand easily.

We have 200 people using the solution. They are developers. 

I've never used technical support in the past. I don't have details as to how helpful or responsive they are. 

The solution is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

The package deployment takes some time. It depends on the size of the data which is being pulled in. For the normal setup, it hardly takes much time. For the most part, it is very fast.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. 

I'm an end-user.

We are using the latest version of SQL Server 2019. Typically, I start on-prem and move to the cloud. 

It's a good tool for merging data from various data sources. We can have automated administrative functions and data-loading features. We can populate the data for the data warehouse and for data merges. This is one of the best analytic tools for a person or enterprise. We can recommend it for data analysis and data analytics purposes.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.