ETL TOOL EVALUATION CRITERIA

Asis Mohanty
CBIP, CDMP
asismohanty@gmail.com

Comparison Criteria
This document provides various criteria to be considered while evaluating
ETL tool such as Informatica, IBM DataStage, AbInitio, SAP BODI, Pentaho
Kettel, Microsoft SSIS, Oracle ODI ..etc

Comparison is based on following Parameters

Architecture
Metadata Support
Ease of Support
Transformations
Performance /Management
Data Quality & MDM
Support for Growth
Advance Data Transformation
3rd Party Compatibility
License and Pricing
Vendor Information

Architecture
Category

Criteria
Scalable and Extensible Technology
Client Platform
Server Platforms

Which DBMS are supported for extraction and loading

Support for ERP Sources
Architecture

Support for complex event processing

XML Support
Web Services
Pre built libraries to handle industry messaging formats like
SWIFT, ISO15022
Real Time feature
Real Time CDC
Code Reusability capability within the product
Parallelism
Code Generator

Architecture (Conn..)
Category

Criteria
Data Transformation Method (Engine Based ?)
Building & Managing Aggregates
Support for various data types

Data Quality Check functionality or feature

Debugging and logging features
Architecture

Exception Handling
How Tool Provides information about exception
Data Archival functionality
Ease of integration with external rules engines like Pega
Restarting an aborted ETL process
Memory (Minimum/ Recommended) requirement at client
machine
Memory (Minimum/ Recommended) requirement at Server
machine
Repository Backup and Recovery
Cloud Integration

Metadata and Setup

Category

Criteria
Metadata Capture
Business View meta data
Meta data security

Metadata

Web Integration support

Versioning Support
Metadata repository's compliance to one of the industry meta
data standards
Meta data views using query tools

Category

Criteria
Easy installation procedure

Ease of setup

Ability to generate Data mart schema similar to source

database
Support for designing data mart
Importing data models from modeling tools

Transformations
Category

Criteria
Filter
Format conversion
Lookup

User Defined / Custom Transformations

Scope for user defined fields
Transformation

Joins
Support for external procedures
Support for XML
Support for BIG Data Integration
Support for Hadoop

Management & DQ
Category

Criteria
Scheduling feature
Workflow Capability
Defining calendar and using it for ad-hoc scheduling

Management

Performance monitoring of ETL process

Performance Options
Specifying the atomicity of the updates
Security Encryption
Impact analysis in-built tool

Category

Criteria
Data Profiling
Data Cleansing

Data Quality and MDM

MDM
Integration with external DQ Tool

Growth & Advance Transformation

Category

Criteria
Ability to handle various source types from flat to files to major
RDBMS
Incremental upload
Support for External loader

Support for Growth

Intermediate file generation during loading

Event based loading
Support for wide range of databases for storing (Target)
information
Familarity with the Tool
Support for multi-user development environment

Category

Criteria
Re-usability

Advance Data
Transformation

Support for built in functions

Handling duplicate records

Lookup cache

3rd Party Integration & Pricing

Category
Compatibility with third
party tools

Category
Consistency and re-use

Category

Criteria
Compatibility of ETL Tools with EAI tools like IBM MQ Series,
TIBCO, Vitria and webMethods as source/ target for the data.

Criteria
Global Meta data

Criteria
Server Licensing

Licensing & Pricing

Client Licensing
Cost saving due to Re-use of Existing license
Package Licensing

Vendor Info
Category

Criteria
2 consecutive years of profitability
Significant third party partner support
Global presence and support

Vendor Info

Number of Customers
Company financial info readily available
Company focus on ETL segment for the future
Client Base
Gartner, Forresters recommendations

About the Author

Asis Mohanty has more than 12 Years of Industry experience on Data

Warehousing and Business Intelligence field. He is a Certified Business
Intelligence Professional from www.tdwi.org and Certified Data
Management Professional from www.dama.org . Asis has worked with
Fortune 100 & IT Service organizations (IBM, Target Corporation, Infosys &
Wipro Technologies) in leadership role.
Email Id: asismohanty@gmail.com