Looking for suggestions on ETL tools for DW/BI Project

Greeting again,

I am back with a very basic question: Given a DW with conformed dimensions, currently 4 factless fact tables, and Dimensions with a few SCD 1 and 2 attributes, is there a good set of tools to help in the ETL for the Warehouse on the market today? We are currently looking to build the DW on a Microsoft Server in the cloud somewhere with the Operational Data Stores possibly on local machines.

You could certainly use what MSFT provides with SQL server (SSIS), its not a bad tool. Tools such as Informatica and Data Stage are very good but expensive compared to SSIS. There are also various open source solutions, but SSIS is free and there are plenty of people around who know the tool.

Thank you for suggesting SSIS. I am already looking at that one. I was just hoping that there was something "better" than "not bad"

I've been using Pentaho Data Integrator (Kettle) and have been pleased with it's ease of use and cost.
But, if you already have SSIS, it is a great tool to do ETL in a Microsoft environment.

Thanks for that plug for Pentaho. I had just sent off a note to our sales rep to see what he has to say about our situation. While we are building on MS SQL, I do not think they have installed the full SSXX package on the servers since we would be the first to seriously use them.

SSIS is pretty good and given that you have already got a license for it it is effectively free (ignoring costs of hardware to run it on, etc.!)
Unless you have a specific requirement that SSIS won't meet then I can't imagine any other ETL tool would stack up against it in any business case you could put together - so I wouldn't waste time looking at other options, all they will give you is different ways of doing the same thing and the time you spend on product comparisons could be more productively spent building stuff with SSIS.

BTW - my background is in Informatica but I wouldn't recommend that given the limited scope of your ETL requirements. On the other hand, if you were going for a company wide data integration, DQ, and data lineage strategy with large numbers of heterogeneous sources and targets (and no budget constraints) then I'd definitely go for Informatica

I have used SSIS and other tools like PowerCenter or Oracle Data integartor, and in my experience SSIS is a good ETL tool, and you noly notice differences with PowerCenter or ODI when you work in a very large datawarehouse with performance problems and with a vast variety of source tables.

Some criteria to evaluate ETL tools (in spanish language):

http://blog.mbitschool.com/2015/03/consideraciones-en-la-seleccion-de-una.html

After doing our testing, we decided to go with Wherescape for our ETL Tool, and Tableau for UI interface.

Thanks for all of your input.