Hi visitor,
i've very less information about datastage,but let me differentiate abinitio with informatica,which are two major ETL tools in present market today
Both tools are fundamentally different. Which one to use depends on the work at hand and existing infrastructure and resources available.
Informatica is an engine based ETL tool, the power this tool is in it's transformation engine and the code that it generates after development cannot be seen or modified.
Ab Initio is a code based ETL tool, it generates ksh or bat etc. code, which can be modified to achieve the goals, if any that cannot be taken care through the ETL tool itself.
Initial ramp up time with Ab Initio is quick compare to Informatica, when it comes to standardization and tuning probably both fall into same bucket.
AbInitio doesn't need a dedicated administrator, UNIX or NT Admin will suffice, where as other ETL tools do have administrative work.
With recent releases of Informatica, it has a built in Change Data Capture capabilities (extract only the chnaged data through the DB logs), where as Ab Initio has to rely on DB to provide the CDC capabilities, as of now it doesn't have a way to sniff the DB logs.
If we go into component level, each tool has it's own way of implementing these transformation components.
Error Handling - In Ab Initio you can attach error and reject files to each transformation and capture and analyze the message and data separately. Informatica has one huge log! Very inefficient when working on a large process, with numerous points of failure
Instant feedback - On execution, Ab Initio tells you how many records have been processed/rejected/etc. and detailed performance metrics for each component. Informatica has a debug mode, but it is slow and difficult to adapt to.
Consolidated Interface - Ab Initio has one tool. One! (that's a good thing) I use no less than 3 tools to develop, test and debug one Informatica 'mapping'.
On the plus side, Informatica does support workflows and scheduling, it's XML based, and is repository-centric where as Ab Initio has a supplemental repository.
Informatica and Ab Initio both support parallelism. But Informatica supports only one type of parallelism but the Ab Initio supports three types of parallesims. In Informatica the developer need to do some partions in server manager by using that you can achieve parallelism concepts. But in Ab Initio the tool it self take care of parallelism we have three types of parallelisms in Ab Initio 1. Component 2. Data Parallelism 3. Pipe Line parallelism this is the difference in parallelism concepts.
We don't have scheduler in Ab Initio like Informatica you need to schedule through script or u need to run manually(i heard that this feature is available in new version of informatica)
Hope this suffices u ,
cheers,
Mukund
