Talend vs SSIS

Introduction to Talend vs SSIS

Talend is an ETL tool that helps an organization with accessible data. This lets you connect to a number of Data Bases. Talend is flexible to work with different data sources and platforms. It helps in data integration, business process management, master data management, and data quality. It can be said as the future of data integration. SSIS stands for “SQL Server Integration Services”. It helps in data migration, transformation, ETL and other functions. This is another ETL Tool that helps in performing complex solutions like reading data from different sources and also it includes analyzing and cleansing data, running ETL processes to update data warehouses. It includes a set of tools called SQL Server Data Tools, for developing and testing integration programs.

Let us study more about Talend and SSIS in detail:

In this article, we will compare two of the best ETL tools available in the market – Talend and SSIS. Before starting this face-off let’s try to find out what Talend and SSIS is? And what they are capable of?

What is Talend?

Talend is an ETL Tool just like Informatica that helps companies by making data more accessible. It lets you connect to a number of Data Bases. Talend is built in such a way that it is flexible enough to work with all the data sources and platforms out there in the market. It includes data integration, data quality, master data management, and business process management. It has everything for you to make your data means for you. We think it’s the future of data integration.

Features of Talend:

• Talend runs on Java platform.
• Talend utilizes JDBC to connect to other database systems.
• Talend stores connection strings in the Metadata where connection strings are defined.
• Talend utilizes Palette to specify the type of task depending on the type of ETL work.
• Processing Palette has various tasks which are used to filter and aggregate data and join multiple data source using the primary.

What is SSIS?

SSIS stands for “SQL Server Integration Services”. To compete in the segment of data migration, ETL, and transformation, Microsoft had introduced SSIS. Microsoft empowers it with all the ammunition to help data migration, transformation, ETL and other functions. This ETL tool can perform complex solution like reading data from different sources, analyzing and cleansing data, running ETL processes to update data warehouses, writing data to different sources and email to particular person or group. It includes a set of tools for developing and testing integration programs, called SQL Server Data Tools

Features of SSIS:

• SSIS can handle data from heterogeneous data sources.
• SSIS is easier to maintain.
• SSIS is tightly integrated with SQL Server and Microsoft Visual Studio.
• SSIS load data into SQL faster by using the SQL Server Destination.
• SSIS remove network bottleneck issue when inserting data into SQL.
• SSIS is better for complex transformations, multi-step operations, aggregating data from different data sources or types, and structured exception handling.

 Head to Head Comparison between Talend and SSIS (Infographics)

Below is the top 8 comparison between Talend and SSIS:

Speed Comparison Between Talend and SSIS

USE CASE

To test the ability of both ETL tools we have loaded 1 delimited flat file to another delimited flat file on the same server.  The file consists of 20M records and approximately size is about 1.5GB.

Cluster configuration

• Server:  IBM – System x3650 M3
• Processor: Intel Xeon X5680 @ 3.33GHz  (2 processors)
• RAM: 76GB
• OS:  Windows Server 2008 R2 – 64 bit
• Talend v5.3.1 Open Studio
• JDK 1.7.0
• JRE 7
• SQL Server 2008 – SP1

COMPARISON Talend vs SSIS

 To get a large enough sample, I ran the test 3 times.

Trial	Records	Talend’s Time	SSIS Time
1	20000000	92.28	49.71
2	20000000	92.99	50.2
3	20000000	86.69	51.83

Talend took 67.69 seconds on an average to complete this job while SSIS completed the same job with an average time of 39.8 seconds.

Talend and SSIS Comparison Table

Below is the comparison table between Talend and SSIS.

Basis For Comparison	SSIS	Talend
Developer	Microsoft	Talend
Objective	Extracting, transforming and loading data from multiple sources with different formatting	Making ETL jobs or sources data from multiple locations and needs to integrate them for better data compatibility
Pros	SSIS allows you to run many processes in parallel.	Easy to use interface
	SSIS provides many tools for transforming data during the migration process.	Designing jobs are very straightforward
Cons	You cannot copy and paste annotations, so if you have several similar ones, you have to type every one of them from scratch.	Syncing with Git is a little difficult.
	Sometimes data type conversion doesn’t work implicitly and you have to do it explicitly.	It can face issues with certain big data problems.
Return on Investment	Once developed your packages are very stable and it requires relatively little maintenance which saves a lot of working time	Talend Data Integration has streamlined data warehouse management which can cuts down on both cost as well as time
Room For Improvement	SSIS can improve the handling of different data types. Also connectivity with different data sources like Salesforce connectivity, Oracle Cloud’s connectivity, etc. will be a big challenge for SSIS. So expecting improvement in these areas.	The open-source version should include features like source code versioning and the parallel execution.
Scalability Issues	None	It requires a bit of tuning before we get to the optimal performance.
Support	The support is excellent. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.	Good support, especially when it relates to the PROD environment.

Conclusion

After this test, it is clearly visible that SSIS performs better than Talend on some simple transformations. But this doesn’t mean SSIS will outperform Talend in all areas.  This test size was small and we know Talend can do a number of things more efficiently that SSIS and it is open source. Now, in the end, we can state that both of these tools have their own Pros and Cons and depend upon your requirement you can make a choice between these two.

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