Talend Data Integration Reviews & Product Details - Page 5

For an Open Source originated solution, Talend really brings a lot of functionality to the table. It has a great user community portal which allows for quick ramp up on the technology stack for users familiar with ETL. The community forums are also a great place to get questions answered and search for pattern ideas. In terms of functionality, unlike many of the competitors, Talend offers a very full feature set in their free offering. The Team and Enterprise editions offer enterprise features (such as CDC, SCD, central job scheduling and versioning functionality) which are relatively straight-forward to implement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is not much to dislike about TDI, however it is worth mentioning that the product release cycles have in the part been pretty buggy. While Talend strives to produce the best product with each release, bugs often slip through. However, if you have a professional (Team/Enterprise) license, Talend support is very good at turning around patches to these bugs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The drag-and-drop interface is easy to use and understand. The low cost also makes it easy to use for every project, especially ones with lean budgets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes it can be hard to debug a job that fails, especially when you first start using it. But after you create a few jobs it gets a lot easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Talend is extremely simple to use right out of the box. There are lots of built in components that make connecting to data sources and processing extremely simple. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a few gotchas that you need to remember when saving some changes otherwise you'll need to redo your work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The features provided in even the Open Studio are enough to do most of the ETL work. It being the open source can be customized as per needs. Its easy accessibility can create the talent pool very easily to satisfy the resourcing needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The enhancements if required needs Java expertise which in general ETL people do not know. Some of the times errors thrown are Java specific. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Probably the better of the open-source ETL tools. A lot of transformation and source/dest components, more than you typically see in other tools. The webservice and message queue integration features are nice, and the ability to expose your jobs as web services is also useful. The flexibility of coding custom java components and logic comes in handy. The approach at reusing metadata via schemas is great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The fact that it's a code generator and requires compiling of the entire code-base anytime you want to test a small change can lead to a frustrating development experience. Job re-use is difficult to achieve with this tool, passing data back and forth is not easy. Unit testing and debugging your code takes a lot of time. The combination of process flow and data flow in the same designer gets confusing and can lead to some messy looking screens. The admin console is very flaky and unstable. Requires a lot of restarts and loses its mind at times reflecting inaccurate or incomplete job statuses and logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To start with Talend offers an Open Source version that can be downloaded free of cost from the Talend website and can satisfy a variety of business requirements through it’s extensive range of components. These components are easily configurable through variety of predefined parameters and drag-n-drop functionalities there by reducing if not eliminating the need to write code and this is something that developers new to the tool (and Java or Perl) would love. Behind the scene, TOS creates Java or Perl script (depending on the type of project created) for the jobs that are designed in the studio. These scripts can then be deployed to run on job servers in a serial or parallel fashion. Talend also provides solid technical support through their Talend Forum (Talend Forge). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As the title of this review says, the studio has a lot of offer, there are many menus, parameters, properties and at times it becomes difficult to get a grasp on all that is happening in a job or a project. Good knowledge of Java and ETL methodologies will help to fully utililze the Data Integration capabilities of Talend, and there is a limited resource pool of such skills. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

During our due diligence while looking for an ETL / data integration tool for our vast needs, Talend rose to the top for a number of reasons. Here are some, but not all reasons we have been using Talend for 6 years and will continue to do so in the long-term future:

1) Open Source - we all know the arguements for open source software versus proprietary, but we really needed a solution we can control, and not be at the mercy of an enterprise software's development team.

2) Support - not only does Talend offer really responsive ticket-based service, but the tools are supported by a passionate community. Whether it be a one-off question or a missing component I needed, I've always been able to find it in a reasonable amount of time. There hasn't been one issue I haven't been able to resolve.

3) Ease of Use - once someone gets past the learning curve, the tool is incredibly easy to use and deploy.

4) Extensibility - we love the fact we can deploy, not to multiple physical servers, but to multiple virtual servers on one box... again, full control.

5) Price - Talend was, by far, the best bang for the buck. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* There were idiosyncrasies to deal with in the early days, but with each release, things have actually been fixed.

* Performance - performance used to be an issue for us in dealing with very large files, however speed has been drastically improved in both, job processing and adminstration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Java integration. TOS supports low level access to Java routines you can write to do all sorts of custom transformations to your data.

In-Database routines. TOS supports many in-database transformation routines, allowing you to save expensive data movement operations and work more efficiently.

Slow Changing Dimensions. TOS has excellent support for SCD's. The SCD editors are very intuitive and easy to use, which makes dealing with SCD's a snap.

The pieces plug into each other like pieces of a puzzle. Unlike a puzzle however, TOS is very simple and straight forward to use. After a little bit of orienting yourself with the product, you often don't need to refer to the documentation much, you can often just click away and get an idea of what component your looking for and how to use it. In the cases that you need to look at the documentation, its all online and very nicely done.

TOS is based on Eclipse, which is a very extensible framework. All of the windows, pallets and toolbars can be resized, moved and closed when not needed. TOS is based on the Java programming language, and allows a lot of low level under the hood access via the Java language. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If your not someone familiar with BASIC Java, then you may find yourself a little bit off balance at first when you have to do something outside of the drag and drop functions. The learning curve is not bad at all however, as most of what you need to do in Java is very basic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is very great open source product in the ETL world. It has almost all the fetaures like commercial ETL tools and even more. It is easy to learn and lot of tutorials, help center on their web site.

Users can do lot of custom development using this and can be used for lot of other functions apart from data integration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1) Debugging is not that user friendly.

2) Automatic rollback features need to be implemented like other commercial tools. That is a drwback here. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The way the parameter passing designed allows to create reusable jobs. Talend's big data features enables leveraging MR job without much coding. Also this being open source provides more flexibility to edit existing components and inheriting user defiined components. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some components/features that Talend provides have defects.They need to bring in more focus on component testing before publishing components in their suite, as at some business cases because of the defects the developer need to look for a workaround. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.