Comparing Informatica And OWB

Mark Rittman has an extensive writeup on how Informatica compares to Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle's included ETL tool. The biggest difference is that OWB only supports Oracle as a destination, but the article goes into much more detail and is a great read.

SQL Server's DTS is the step child in the ETL tool field, although it has much more functionality than many people realize and is ideal for many tasks (I've seen it process millions of records for a Siebel system reliably on a nightly basis). It is not an ideal enterprise tool however, as it lacks some things expected on such tools, like Metadata integration, compliance with OMG standards, and the fact that many essential features are turned off by default, and must be activated on a per-package basis (such as logging and error alerting). It does have some advantages however, mainly easy bulk loading of flat files, custom tranformations, a built in object to interact with analysis services cubes, and the ability to load anything accessible with an OLE or ODBC driver, from any available database to Excel spreadsheets to text files.

One of the top new features in SQL Server 2005 is supposed to be the beefed-up DTS, which the developers claim will compete with any commercial ETL tool. Considering the cost of many ETL tools, it will be something to look at very closely.

DTS has usually done the job in projects I've worked on, but that's probably because very few companies have tried to implement any sort of metadata management across the enterprise. In such a case, Informatica definitely fills a need few others can match presently.

If you aren't familiar with Metadata and how it fits in the big picture (and very very few people do), or how the OMG is trying to standardize it, take a look at this presentation.