6 month on.. My observations on Data Services vs SSIS

Question

Hi all,
I'd like to share some observations on my first six months working with Data Services.  I have previously worked with SSIS for several years and have some minor experiense with Datastage also.
Firstly, let me say that I am largely happy with Data Services.  There are pro's and Cons, but for an SAP ECC shop like us, it solves more problems than it causes. 
The positives:
The ability to call SAP extractors directly, saves huge amounts of time and money for us.  We can do in DS in a day what would take weeks if we have to use openhub and SSIS combined.
The Query transform is really flexible and does in one step what would take several in SSIS.
DS is more tolerant of metadata changes.
Template tables are a great feature that support quick turn-around.
The negatives:
Crashes = DS 4.0 is a buggy tool.  Everytime I loose network connectivty it crashes.  It crashes randomly at other times as well.  I'd say once every 2 days would be about the average between crashes.  SSIS isn't perfect, but is much more stable than that.
Debugging - SSIS's visual debugging is far superior to what DS has
Attitude - There is a certain degree of arrogance amongst SAP/BO consultants I have dealt with.  I have heard phrases like 'SSIS is not an ETL tool' and SSIS just runs SQL' several times.  That's a load of BS.    Both tools are quite similar in many ways, and the reality is DS does a lot more push-down to the database than SSIS does out of the box.
Community - SSIS has a great community.  If I ask a question in an SSIS formum, I know i'll get an answer by the next day.  Here, I'd say half my questions are never answered.   Micrsoft have several people monitoring the forums at all times and they do a great job of this.
lock-down - With SSIS, I can download a free eval of SQL Server (or buy a dev only copy very cheaply), install it on my PC at home and try things out.  With DS, thats not an option. 
No 3rd party extensions - there are lots of 3rd party extensions available for SSIS.  I've yet to find any for DS.
This is not meant to to be a negative post; i'd be interested in hearing other's point of view on this. 
Thanks.
Leigh.

Answer 1

If you need to get data from ECC, then data services is probably your best option.  But it is a big investment.
Conceptually, DS is similar to SSIS - think if SSIS as a basic version ( I worked with SSIS before DS, and I wouldn't ever go back).  I would say you will need 6 months to get up to speed with it enough to be able to build production ready easy to support code.  You will probably have the quick and dirty stuff going in a few weeks.  We bought in a consultant to teach us on the job for 3 weeks, so I never had any formal training, but that would probably be a good idea.
There is no point keeping SSIS if you have DS, so the plan would be to migrate over time. 
The other option is to look at SAP rapidmarts.  These are basically pre-built datamarts for SAP  - you load them into data services, change the connection details and run them !  If you went this route, you could use SAP consultants to set it up, but you would still need DS skills to support it.
Either way, and independent of DS, you will need some serious expertise on the SAP side to help you.  Even a data services expert couldn't necessarily build a solution based on ECC without a subject matter expert to help.