SSIS Reviews

We have used SSIS in many ways. Primarily, it has been used for building ETLs for populating data warehouse and staging areas. We have developed a number of data marts that were populated. We build data migration packages, which have been reused a number of times with minimal configurations. Additionally, we build complex data integrations solutions and data hand-offs between different applications. We have even used it for creating and parsing SWIFT messages for data integration purposes. We also used it for email triggers. 

Now SSIS has introduced Big Data and cloud components. Though we haven't used any of these yet but it's really a very good addition to enhance SSIS capabilities.

SSIS is a tool which anybody can learn in no time. When we started the project, the whole team learnt it in one week's time and then were ready to start on project tasks. It gives you control. Recently, we used SSIS for a compliance project where we performed data cleansing and extensive data transformations to prepare data files for use of compliance (Trade Based AML solutions) application.

Script task and Script component for custom tasks: It gives you power to build your own logic if your requirements are not being fulfilled with existing available components. While the big thing is you can build your own components, that is not so straightforward. 

It's visual design interface is good and you can easily understand the flow. 

The debugging capabilities are great, particularly during data flow execution. You can look into the data and see what's going on in the pipeline. It has good logging capabilities as well.

It should have other programming languages supported as well from a scripting perspective. Currently, only C# and VB.NET are supported, which limits it to .NET. It should have Java support as well. 

We couldn't explore big data related components, and this area should be up to the mark, if not already. Certain data quality checks should also be part of it. Currently, this is the biggest area that should be looked into. Data quality is an essential part of the integration process and ETL. Currently, only the data profiling task is there. 

As an update, now SSIS offers big data components as well. 

5+ years.

I've been using it for last 7 years in different projects for different banks. Didn't face any stability issues yet.

Yes. It's very much scalable, but it all depends on how you design your solution. SSIS provides you extensive features and toolkit to handle all sort of data problems.

I also used Oracle Data Integrator as an ETL tool but it all depends on your need and customer preference. SSIS is being easy to use and things can be developed very quickly so I prefer to use SSIS for most of my data related tasks.

Its setup is very easy. You don't need too many components to start building ETL tools. Plus, there are a lot of online learning available for this tool. It can be deployed on any Windows machine with minimal requirements.

If you have SQL Server License then you can use SSIS without any additional cost.

Overall, we remained in a good position and in control while using SSIS. We didn't face any challenges.

I use this solution to create BI reports. I have used SSIS in more than twenty projects over the past six years.

There are many good features in this solution including the data fields, database integration, support for SQL views, and the lookups for matching information.

I have had problems in the past with this tool. The debugging could be improved because when it came to solving the errors that I've experienced in the past, I've had to look at the documentation for more information.

The main difficulty that I have had is to match different data types, where there were errors that I could not fix.

I would like to see better integration with the control sources. 

I am satisfied with the technical support for this solution.

The initial setup of this solution is quite simple.

We handled the installation of this solution in-house.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

SSIS is helpful when you have tasks in a particular workflow that need to be completed on different schedules. You can start a specific task, and SSIS goes through the workflow to check a few things before it decides whether the task needs to proceed. Right now, maybe a quarter of the company is using it, but we plan to expand use in the future. 

The main value of any Microsoft product is the ease of use. You can achieve more with less time. That's what's beneficial for me. With many competitors, you might need to spend more time coming up with a solution because you have to focus on taking care of the product.

It would be nice if you could run SSIS on other environments besides Windows.

We use SSIS ad hoc when a problem arises that requires it. We've used it a few times over the last year.

SSIS is stable.

SSIS is scalable.

Microsoft support isn't helpful most of the time. We get most of our answers from forums. 

Installing SSIS is straightforward and takes an hour or two.

We deployed SSIS in-house. 

We've seen a return on using SSIS. 

An SQL Server license includes licenses for the database engine, reporting services, SSIS, and analysis services. That's the nice thing about this package. When you buy it, you get all of these different add-ons.

I rate SSIS eight out of 10. I would recommend it. 

SSIS integrates well with SQL servers and Microsoft products.

From a cost perspective, it's a cheaper option than other ETL tools.

Also, it has a lot of in-built transformation, and it's easy to learn.

I would like to see more features in terms of the integration with Azure Data Factory.

I've worked with this solution for about four years, on both the on-premises and cloud solutions. We had around 3000 plus users.

It's a stable solution.

Technical support is not efficient, and I've had to search on the web to solve the problems.

I worked on PowerCenter.

The initial setup is straightforward and is not complex. It took about a day to install.

You would need two to three technical staff for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We used an integrator for the deployment process.

SSIS is a cheaper option compared to the cost of other ETL tools.

SSIS is a cheaper solution, and I would recommend it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at seven.

This product is always used in projects because I'm in a company that develops software for other companies and we accept this type of work like programming and developing data models and writing the script for organizations to transfer their data between databases. We usually use these tools, and it's a cheap tool for us.

Usually, when I want to import data from other databases I use this solution. It's been about fifteen years that I've worked with an SQL server, and I'm a software developer. I've had many companies with different databases, and it's ranged from FoxPro, EDX and Oracle, and some other databases. When I want to import data I usually use this tool for importing data from the other databases to the server. It is really good, and it's solved many problems for me because I can choose the source table, destination table, source field, and destination field. I can match these things, I can write some queries to do this and because of that, I use this tool.

Sometimes when we want to publish to other types of databases it's not easy to publish to those databases. For example, the Jet Database Engine. Before the SSIS supported Jet Database Engine but nowadays it doesn't support the Jet Database Engine. We connect to many databases such as Access database, SparkPros databases and the other types of databases using Jet Database Engines and SSIS now doesn't seem to support it in our databases.

In future releases, it would be helpful to support new SQL databases. It would also be helpful if there was a way to use SQL with other languages like Python or ASP.NET.

The stability is very good and I recommend it to my friends, my coworkers, and the other companies.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup was very easy for us and very good.

I installed the solution by myself.

The price is important to us. We are based in Iran, and we look for products with a good price because of the sanctions. Some other products such as Oracle are expensive here and we do not recommend these products to our customers. They are expensive and they are very difficult to work with them. They are very difficult and very complicated but Microsoft products are not like that.

I used this product when I was a student so I chose this technology because I understood it best. 

We chose the solution because we have some data in Oracle and we wanted to extract it and load the data into SQL Server. 

The type of port, like SSIS, I always recommend other companies to use it and other Microsoft products because they are very easy to use. There are very handy tools. It's very user-friendly and has a good dashboard.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

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 have data that needs to be migrated. There is also a scan inventory. We create web data, pull it, search it, and then find answers and report stakeholders. So for this process, we use the SSIS.

You can get data from any data source with SSIS and dump it to any outside source. It is helpful. Getting, extracting, converting, and dumping data doesn't require much effort because we can do everything in the user interface. You drag and drop, then give the required input. It's intuitive.

Sometimes we need to connect to AWS to get additional data sources, so we have to install some external LAN and not a regular RDBMS. We need external tools to connect. It would be great if SSIS included these tools. I'd also like some additional features for row indexing and data conversion. 

We've been using SSIS for about four and a half years. 

If you run SSIS from the local system, it will lag, but it will work properly if you host on the cloud somewhere. It's a headache every time you run this locally.

Almost 10 percent of our users work with SSIS. It's more than a hundred. 

We haven't had that many problems. I have interacted with Microsoft support for some things, but it was a few minor issues. And with the updated VPA, it has been clear. I was satisfied with the support. We don't need support for these types of issues. We don't need to contact the support team or stop our business. 

The initial setup is never a complex process because the interface is user-friendly. If you are working with complex situations, then it can get complicated. We have a DBA team to handle the deployment. We must follow a process to deploy, so we need to get approval whenever there is a change. It's not easy for us, but it's still good, and it doesn't take much time. 

SSIS is on the cheaper side. In terms of value for the money, rivals are offering more database formats and cost processing, so SQL is lagging somewhat. 

I rate SSIS eight out of 10. I recommend it. 

The solution is a business application. It's used for integrations between different databases, migrating from one to one, and importing data from one thing to something else.

Overall, it works well. 

The performance is good.

It's saved time using visualization descriptions. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The product is scalable.

It's stable. 

We find the solution to be reasonable. 

We have faced some problems, mostly from a different provider with different language handling.

We'd like the solution to increase the types of integrations on offer. We'd like more integration capabilities. 

I've been using the solution for 20 years. 

It's very stable and reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is fine. 

We can scale the solution just fine. 

It is our plan to increase usage in the future. 

We have ten users on the solution right now.

I've never used technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be if we needed assistance. 

We did not previously use another solution. 

The solution is straightforward to set up. It's not overly complex. It takes about half an hour to set up.

We have five people that can handle deployment or maintenance tasks. 

We can handle the initial setup on our own. We do not need outside assistance from integrators or consultants. 

The solution is fairly priced. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of affordability.

My company is a Microsoft partner, and we use multiple Micorosft products.

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.