Can anyone tell me the pros and cons of using DecisionStream vs Informatica please?
My initial thoughts are:
DS strengths
- metadata management
- integration to COGNOS BI tools
Informatica strengths
- flexibility
- better performance when dealing with extremely large volumes of data
- ETL is its primary business whereas COGNOS is a BI vendor that extended its product range to include an ETL tool
What do you mean by flexibility?
Where can I see objective stats that show Informatica has better performance than DS? Doesn't this also depend a lot on A) the RDBMS and machine use and B) how efficient the designer has built the ETL logic?
Cognos is an ADT business that extended its product range to include BI. It was doing ETL years BEFORE BI (see PowerHouse QTP). It has now moved on and extended its product range to include CPM/BPM applications. I think that to say Cognos is a BI business is to say that Microsoft is an OS business or Oracle is a DB business or IBM is a hardware business.
In my experience The key diferentiators for Informatica are integration with data cleansing tools (like First Logic) and the ability to scale to multi server environments in order to increase throughput.
DecisionStream has the ability to integrate with 3rd party apps, but only through job control and command line interface, or through custom development against an api (like creating a dll to reference within a function).
On the scalable architecture point...once you have done everything you can in order to improve the efficiency of your etl code and application architecture (network, SAN, database), the only thing you can do is add processors and RAM. With Informatica you can add servers.
However, DecisionStream has some novel dimensional functionality that is effective and easy to use. Managing surrogates, SCD's and late arriving facts is fantastic.
The key problem for both is that it seems to take a certain kind of person to want to dig into them and really learn how to use them. There are so few quality developers out there...anybody here an expert level DS developer?