Thinking about using Cognos Data Manager for your ETL?

Please, please, please don’t.

It’s ugly. It’s unwieldy. It’s hard to debug. It’s inefficient. It’s entirely geared towards delivering simple warehouses using Cognos tools. It’s got settings hidden everywhere.

I’m sure it was pretty good at some point in the past. But i’d rather use DTS, which has all the above flaws, but nowhere near as bad.

Update – following answering a query on a forum to ask why SSIS vs Cognos data Manager, I added a few reasons for this:

1) It’s old product – so it lacks functionality that SSIS has, in terms of connectivity and capability – most work has to be devolved back to the database layer via SQL, e.g. aggregation

2) If you think debugging SSIS is hard, Data Managers only audit function is the logs, which are massive text files you have to trawl though after execution

3) It’s slow, and very “Black box” – unlike SSIS you have very few options for performance tuning by changing settings

4) It cannot be extended – so no custom components, and very poor scripting support.

5) Settings can be deeply hidden and often the only way to find things is by trawling through components until you find them.

6) There’s a very good chance DM will be deprecated as IBM has too many ETL tools and this ain’t one of the good ones!