In this blog we will cover common challenges companies experience using SSIS, and hear from our customer Travel Chapter who have moved from SSIS to Kleene.
Why should you consider moving away from it?
As probably the most well known ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool, Microsoft's SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) originally launched in 2005 as the replacement for their Data Transform Services utilities.
In the 16+ years since SSIS’s release the data used has evolved; vastly increased volumes, sources and complexity of its use from visualizations to AI. Which leads to the question: Does SSIS offer the same speed and flexibility as modern tools such as Kleene?
There are three common themes we hear when talking with companies still using SSIS.
Complex / Clunky
For traditional ETL tools, developer experience and coding skills are often nice to have, whereas for SISS these are a requirement.
With limited support, home grown workarounds are often needed, adding to the complexity and maintenance overhead.
Performance / Speed
Instances of SSIS run on an on premise server with packages typically being processed overnight. These can struggle to complete within an acceptable window. Therefore, performance is limited to hardware available, where either dedicated or shared resources bring costs or clashes as their respective problems.
Team size & skills
SSIS ETL tools are generally interface-driven, which can make teams struggle when exploring, analyzing and solving problems. This is a challenge for businesses who have limited resources in the team. Therefore, SSIS requires the hiring of developers, engineers and DBAs.
Therefore, moving to a more modern software, such as Kleene, will solve these pains. With Kleene platform tools you will have the opportunity to deliver quicker data ingestion, since this information isn’t sent to a secondary server for rebuilding. With Kleene’s modern software, data can be stacked and changed at once and in real-time.
Kleene provides a visual Directed Acyclic Graph interface (DAG), which helps with your workflow. This is a chart that is coordinated and without cycles interfacing different edges. This implies that it is difficult to cross the whole chart starting at one edge. A DAG contains individual bits of work, which are called tasks, and which will let you know what needs to be done if a task fails.
For instance, our client, Travel Chapter, didn’t have the dependencies automatically calculated. Therefore, Kleene has provided them with a visual DAG interface to help with their workflow. When Travel Chapter adopted the dependency graph of Kleene, they started to quickly understand where their data was coming to and from. Visual DAG has also helped them recognize places by which they had circular references. This assisted Travel Chapter with advancing the engineering of the warehouse they were building.
Travel Chapter were also struggling with meeting their key business objectives. After their migration project with Kleene, they have been able to build a modern warehouse without having to worry about integrations with specific APIs. This means they are now free from worrying about keeping the connectors up to date (which perform transfer of control and data across components), as Kleene is now doing this for them.
Kleenes SaaS enables the logical data warehouse. The Logical Data Warehouse elevates the capabilities from traditional ETL platforms, where they cannot accommodate all the use cases and ever changing business requests.
By combining the two technologies, Data Abstraction and Data Transformation, the Kleene ELT platform enables the Logical Data Warehouse architecture. All relational and non-relational data sources can be consolidated and used for immediate analysis using SQL and the Kleene Data transformation.
These are only some of the reasons why companies are moving away from SSIS to Kleene. You don’t have to struggle with your data anymore. Let Kleene do the heavy lifting for you. Speak to one of our experts today.
