Talend Data Integration Reviews & Product Details

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.

Processes are defined using workflow mapping, much like ESB's or BI products.

There are a large number of adapters for many databases and data types already included with the product. The fact that the Talend IDE is based on Eclipse IDE, also makes it easy for developers who already use the Eclipse IDE. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is a bit memory and processor intensive. So expect there to be some lag on older machines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It was easy to add custom code to the data flows to get specific use cases accomplished without purchasing other tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I first checked Talend out to solve a specific case of performing ETL work quickly without the knowledge of Map Reduce on Hadoop. Since Talend had integration components for Hadoop and has a nice interface, I felt we should give it a try. It was extremely difficult to get this to work the "first" time. After a few days of searching I was finally able to get it to work. Once it worked it worked perfectly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

First There a lots and lots of connector available for each and every task needed to be performed in real production environment.

Second, there is lot of help/solution available in internet when stuck somewhere. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

for new developers like me who don't have java background sometime its very difficult to debug issue Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.