Updated April 29, 2023
Difference Between Talend vs SSIS
Talend is an ETL tool that helps an organization with accessible data. This lets you connect to several Data Bases. Talend is flexible in working 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. Also, it includes analyzing and cleansing data and running ETL processes to update data warehouses. It consists of a set of SQL Server Data Tools 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 find out what Talend and SSIS are. And what are they capable of?
What is Talend?
Talend is an ETL Tool like Informatica that helps companies by making data more accessible. It lets you connect several Data Bases. Talend is built to be flexible enough to work with all the data sources and platforms in the market. It includes data integration, quality, master data management, and business process management. It has everything for you to make your data mean for you. We think it’s the future of data integration.
Features of Talend:
- Talend runs on the Java platform.
- Talend utilizes JDBC to connect to other database systems.
- Talend stores connection strings in the Metadata where connection strings are defined.
- Talend uses Palette to specify the type of task depending on the kind of ETL work.
- Processing Palette has various tasks that filter and aggregate data and joins multiple data sources 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 introduced SSIS. Microsoft empowers it with all the ammunition to help data migration, transformation, ETL, and other functions. This ETL tool can perform complex solutions like reading data from different sources, analyzing and cleansing data, running ETL processes to update data warehouses, writing data to other sources, and emailing a particular person or group. It includes 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 loads 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 vs SSIS (Infographics)
Below is the top 8 comparisons between Talend vs SSIS:
Speed Comparison Between Talend vs 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 the approximate 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 average to complete this job, while SSISendedd the same job with an average time of 39.8 seconds.
Talend vs SSIS Comparison Table
Below is the comparison table between Talend vs 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 is 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 tricky. |
| Sometimes data type conversion doesn’t work implicitly, and you must do it explicitly. | It can face issues with specific big data problems. | |
| Return on Investment | Once developed, your packages are very stable, requiring relatively little maintenance, which saves a lot of working time. | Talend Data Integration has streamlined data warehouse management, which can cut down on costs and time. |
| Room For Improvement | SSIS can improve the handling of different data types. Also, connectivity with other 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 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 various functionality that saves a lot of time. | Good support, especially when it relates to the PROD environment. |
Conclusion
After this test, SSIS obviously 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 several things more efficiently than SSIS, and it is open source. Ultimately, we can state that both tools have pros and Cons, and depending on your requirement, you can choose between them.
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