Which ETL tool do you recommend?

Question

I am using Oracle as a database. We have decided to use another database and need to use ETL tool to transform the data from Oracle to that database.

I have never worked in any ETL tool and also didn't know about it. After doing some web searching, I found some tools like Pentaho, Clover, Talend etc. But, even after reading on these, I am not able to decide which one to use.

Which is the better tool to get start with, easiest to use, and has good performance?

Answer 1

It's impossible to answer your question without arguing on the migration requirements. Generally speaking, however, the tools your cited are all nice and focus on a particular capabilities set which could help you during the choice:

• Talend: it's eclipse-based; this means that it's really powerful, stable and customizable (creating custom components or even entire eclipse plugins, if you want) and standard (ie. the project structure follows the eclipse stack). It's quite-well embeddable, as it produces java code, but this could be an hassle for the newcomer anyway. The drawback is the learning curve: if you don't manage java at all, your learning curve will be VERY steep, but if you have a java developer in your team, Talend would be a great choice.

• Penthao: it's another well-estabilished solution. Its ETL tool (named Kettle) is just a component of their wider Business Intelligence open platform, which is really good if you need reporting services, OLAP, data mining and so. It's java-based, but the language is completely hidden, so you don't need to be a java developer to use it efficiently. The major drawback is that Kettle is much harder to extend than Talend. This means: poor connectors/components out-of-the-box, few community-made collections. Integration with existing java application would be REALLY a pain in the neck, too!

• CloverETL: I don't use it very often, as it's mostly the younger brothers of the others. Its major advantages are: it's light, easily embeddable and easy to learn. But it's really much less powerful than Talend and even than Kettle.