ETL for agile analysts

There are mostly two types of ETL as a service on the market: one is super easy to use and can migrate your data across services and databases but lacks transformation capabilities, while the other needs full-time data engineers to operate but tailored solutions are available programmatically. Xplenty sits in the golden middle letting analysts and engineers deploying custom transformation jobs in minutes even based on multiple data sources. The UI is intuitive but you can always use SQL to filter your sources or to create new sets in scheduled packages. Also, there are plenty of built-in functions available. Running costs are not comparable of running your own services on Heroku or Google cloud but its intuitive features save a lot of engineering hours. I would recommend Xplenty for agile teams having multiple sources of data where data analysts frequently needs custom datasets to deliver insights.

Pros

- wide variety of sources and destinations - visual editor makes creating packages quick and easy - SQL transformations - great, quick, responsive support - free unlimited hours of sandbox - Slack integration

Cons

- expansive for hourly jobs - error logs are not always informative - transforming JSON or other nested data is not trivial

No-SQL to SQL

Pros

We have a complex and highly nested no-sql DB. Xplenty was the only ETL solution that allowed us get out data into tabular format for analysis

Cons

None. Its been great. Haven't had any issues.

Flexible & Powerful

Pros

Xplenty's easy-to-use interface makes it possible for less-technical members of my team to dive in and create/edit ETL jobs and schedules. We use Xplenty to enhance partner data, transform and add flexibility to how we structure and consume various data streams. Xplenty makes this easy.

Cons

There are a few feature requests that we've submitted for some time now that have not been able to get rolled into the product. Namely, the inability to output fields containing special characters as a part of the field name has been especially limiting.

My Views on Xplenty after using it for 2+ years

Pros

1.The user experience is so good. 2.Every feature and usability has been simplified unlike in other enterprise ETL tools. 3. The managed service for infrastructure is the USP of xplenty. 4. The customer support is so active and get back to us with the solution on time. 5. Xplenty is on PAR with enterprise level tools.

Cons

I did not have anything like that, but there is a room for improvement in cluster management and a request for feature is they can bring a in-built support for handling array data type.

Great way to bring in different data sources into a warehouse easily

Pros

It's very easy to set up a package or workflow to bring in data from production databases, Google analytics, facebook, etc. There are also a number of ways to transform the data that are built in. For example, I have user agent strings in my database, and Xplenty can easily make those into browser version, device type , and other separate columns. Scheduling of jobs is very intuitive for both the less technical user and for users that are very familiar with crontabs

Cons

It can be really difficult to debug a package. It would be nice to be able to see intermediate outputs along the way in in a complicated package. Would also be nice to have a good way to retry a package more than once in case it fails and then be able to define success/failure for the entire package Error messages on failure could be more helpful