Matillion vs. SQL Server Integration Services

Great: Need to query simpler APIs, or utilize well known services such as GSheets etc.? Matillion has got some of the best and easiest to use connectors out there. Not so great: Do you need have a competent CI/CD flow that you will be able to update / compare from Matillion as well as other sources at the same time? Good luck, you will need to be extra careful, as you might have to have a deeper dive into your servers Terminal each time you have a git conflict.

Incentivized

Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.

Incentivized

• The user interface of your data pipelines makes it easier for people who aren’t as techy as data engineers to observe what's going on.
• Customer support is quick, not always as efficient as you would want it to be, but still.
• Nice documentation available.

Incentivized

• SSIS works very well pulling well-defined data into SQL Server from a wide variety of data sources.
• It comes free with the SQL Server so it is hard not to consider using it providing you have a team who is trained and experienced using SSIS.
• When SSIS doesn't have exactly what you need you can use C# or VBA to extend its functionality.

Incentivized

• Static and monolithic, it will show its limits when running multiple concurrent jobs.
• Github and versioning implementation is messy and broken. Don't use it.
• There's not way to see/query the system resources, just wait for a server to crash due to out of memory. An admin panel would be appreciated + some env variables with updated info.
• API implementation is cumbersome and limited.
• There's no concept of hub and worker engine, everything happens of the same server (designing workflows and executing them). Having separate light ETL engines to run job could be better. (sort of docker/kubernetes/lambda functions).
• Handling of variables is limited especially for returned values from sub components.
• Some components could return more metadata at the end of their execution instead of the standard one.
• Billing is badly designed not taking into account that the server is hosted by the client. Expensive.
• We had several issue with migration where starting a new instance was required and then migrating the content. It was painful and time consuming also have to deal with support and engineering team on Matillion side.
• CDC doesn't work as expected or it is not a mature product yet.

Incentivized

• SSIS memory usage can be quite high particularly when SSI and SQL server are on the same machine
• SSIS is not available on any environment other than Microsoft Windows
• SSIS does not function with any database engine back-end other than Microsoft SQL Server

Incentivized

Matillion is easy to use and flexible to debug. Performance are good and support is giving us a good service level. There are still some technical points to be developed more (such as SAP extraction). but easy flows are really fast to be developed. We are also using a tool for migration from other tools, and it is useful as Matillion is producing XML code.

Incentivized

SSIS is responsible for running core business processed managing core business data. It can be managed, improved and expanded using minimal internal resources. It is also able to support all of our current data infrastructure. Replacing SSIS would be time consuming and costly with no apparent ROI.

Incentivized

Easy tasks are really easy, and complex tasks are still possible. With prior knowledge of general data warehousing principles and experience with other data transformation tools, it's straightforward to get familiar with and use Matillion. I initially used minimal external support from a partner for some more complex tasks but very soon could work entirely independently with Matillion.

Incentivized

SSIS has a drag and drop based developer interface, so it is relatively straight forward to get started. You can start to get into the weeds pretty quickly as your solution becomes more complex. However, most of the base functions are right in front of you for a developer. You can also set project and solution level parameters, so when you deploy to new environments, you don't have to jump into each package to change your variables and settings. (For example, default directory to ingest flat files).

Incentivized

Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.

Incentivized

Overall, I've found Matillion to be responsive and considerate. I feel like they value us as a customer even when I know they have customers who spend more on the product than we do. That speaks to a motive higher than money. They want to make a good product and a good experience for their customers. If I have any complaint, it's that support sometimes feels community-oriented. It isn't always immediately clear to me that my support requests are going to a support engineer and not to the community at large. Usually, though, after a bit of conversation, it's clear that Matillion is watching and responding. And responses are generally quick in coming.

Incentivized

The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

We were able to control on access and built various enviroment for implementation

Incentivized

The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools

Incentivized

We selected Matillion primarily because of it's ability to connect to numerous data sources and easily create transformation jobs. While Fivetran does a better job managing and examining deltas, it is not easy to use and is very non user friendly. SSIS was not a good fit for our team and required a significant amount of attention and server management that we did not want to invest in.

I think SQL Server Integration Services is better suited for on-premises data movement and ADF is more suited for the cloud. Though ADF has more connectors, SQL Server Integration Services is more robust and has better functionality just because it has been around much longer

Incentivized

We're using Matillion on EC2 instances, and we have about 20 projects for our clients in the same instance. Sometimes, we're struggling to manage schedules for all projects because thread management is not visible, and we can't see the process at the instance level.

Incentivized

• Time savings -- we could custom code nearly everything Matillion does, but it would take days/weeks instead of minutes/hours.
• There's a bit of a learning curve to truly unlock Matillion's potential, and that can be frustrating for some new users, but once you get over that curve, the possibilities are endless.
• It allows us to centralize the hundreds of way to bring data in, so that even if you have to troubleshoot what someone else wrote, it's easy to jump in and understand what is happening.

Incentivized

• Without this, we would have to manually update a spreadsheet of our SQL Server inventory
• We would also have poor alerting; if an instance was down we wouldn't know until it was reported by a user
• We only have one other person who uses SQL Server Integration Services , he's the expert. It would fall to me without him and I would not enjoy being responsible for it.

Incentivized