What is a good,stable and preferably free alternative to SQL Server Integration Services?
I'm so tired of this buggy piece of software.
+1
A:
You could buy Ab Initio or Informatica.
But I'm betting those have bugs as well. Doesn't all software have bugs? Except the stuff that I write, of course.
duffymo
2009-09-19 20:33:17
its the amount of bugs and quirks i dislike. Even space Shuttle Software has Bugs.
Johannes Rudolph
2009-09-20 06:19:26
Right, but what you won't know is how many the replacement you'll bring in has. You might find that it's worse.
duffymo
2009-09-20 12:54:41
+2
A:
Poor Man's SSIS:
For importing: Bulk Insert, BCP, OpenQueryset, MS-Access with tables linked to SQL Server tables and custom VB or C# code.
For exporting: BCP, SQLCMD and custom .net code.
For transforms: T-SQL, SQL Server Agent, Service Broker, and SLQCLR custom code.
Lots of limitations and lots of work implementing your own things, but generally very reliable if you know what you are doing.
And NO, there's nothing thats cheap, easy, general and reliable (pick two only). That's why SSIS (and DTS before it) have survived as long as they have.
RBarryYoung
2009-09-19 20:47:49
+4
A:
I m using SSIS for the moment but a colleague point me to Talend as a very good solution.
DomreiRoam
2009-09-21 12:58:14
Who said there were no bugs. I said I hadn't found it to be "buggy", which to me means, "full of bugs". "Not buggy" means "not full of bugs", not "no bugs".
John Saunders
2010-01-15 16:17:13
A:
SSIS is buggy. As an example, expressions that just dont work right on multi core serwers..
toper
2010-01-15 15:43:41
How many bugs is an application allowed to have before you consider it to be "buggy"? Also, in the case of this Connect bug report, I wonder if the values of the variables were dependent on the order of evaluation of the expressions?
John Saunders
2010-01-15 16:20:44
Okay, 'buggy' may not be the best word in this context.IMHO expressions are very important for any SSIS developer. This was reported in early 2009.. It should be fixed by now. And no, the order of evaluation did not matter (in my case).
toper
2010-01-15 20:48:50
Scribe is expensive, ridged and not very reliable in my experience. Avoid it!
Jason Webb
2010-07-03 05:30:19
+5
A:
Having been very frustrated by SSIS's shortcomings (poor logging, inability to place packages on SVN, unreliability of tasks, etc.), I've been writing my own C# programs for data integration tasks. However, I'm starting to use Rhino ETL for the job, which is free & open source.
You do have to manually obtain it via git from the link above, then build it through PowerShell. After all that you don't get nice interfaces from SSIS or any of the other tools listed here, but what you do get is far more control with your ETL processes & you don't need to install a JVM to use it as it's written in .NET.
You can find some documentation for it here.
Simon Rice
2010-01-22 21:02:42
All our SSIS pacakges are in Subversion. We save them as files and put them in just like anything else.
HLGEM
2010-03-18 19:11:04
Of course they are. The problem of sticking SSIS projects into any version control system is that they sometimes carry machine specific paths/locations, making it hard to collaborate between multiple developers. The one that bugs me the most, though, is that it tends to save dtsx packages as a single line of xml. This makes it hard to tell who changed what part of the package. So while by all means you CAN place it in version control, it is less than optimal (and maybe even useless).
enriquein
2010-04-29 13:45:43
You can load package configurations from an external file and store paths on a per-environment basis in that file. You can also specify the path to the file in an environment variable, which even the debugger will honour.
ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
2010-07-12 12:46:48
A:
much cheaper then the above yet just as great- www.expressor-software.com
Chris
2010-03-18 19:08:06
+1
A:
You may also want to take a look at ezpressor - http://www.expressor-software.com/ssis-performance-alternative.htm
Michael
2010-07-12 15:25:27
A:
Whenever I complain about SSIS at work a colleage of mine suggests IBM's Cognos.
Pieces
2010-07-21 18:16:55
A:
Some open source substitutes that are better than SSIS are Jitterbit, Pentaho, and Talend. If those don’t work out for you, there are some affordable non open source ETL Tools like Centerprise, Dataflux, and Altova to name a few. See company links below. You should watch their demos first before trying them. Hope this helps...
I tried posting the company links, but I need reputation points, haha.
theETLguy
2010-09-09 20:42:48
@John Saunders: I beg to differ. I've wrote really good etl's in c# AND SSIS is junk
Chris
2010-09-09 21:15:07
+1
A:
This question is very similar to Should programmers use SSIS, and if so, why?
Copied my answer from there:
I tried using SSIS several times, and gave up on it. IMO it is much easier to just do all I need in C#. SSIS is too complex, it has too many gotchas, and it is just not worth it. It is much better to spend more time on improving C# skills than to spend same time on learning SSIS - you'll get much more return on your training.
Also finding and maintaining functionality in a VS solution is so very much easier. Unit testing with VS is easy. All I need to do is to check in the source in Subversion, and verify how it loaded. Unit testing SSIS packages is very involved to put it mildly.
Besides, there were situations when SSIS was silently failing to populate some columns in some rows, just skipping them without raising exceptions. We spent a lot of time troubleshooting and figuring out what is going on. Developing an alternative solution in C# took less than an hour, and works without any problems for two years.
AlexKuznetsov
2010-10-08 03:22:20