great test and article!

I did similar tests 2 or 3 years ago and was looking at SSIS, Talend and Pentaho. A lot of things changed since then but looks like the same thing true for Talend still - you need to mess with JVM and fight out of memory issues. This is just not good for a professional ETL tool.

I was amazed though with different possibilities and tons of features but these errors turned me away. Pentaho was great though and while they also use JVM and Eclipse, I did not have to mess with JVM.

If you read this article because you are looking for a good ETL tool, check Magic Gartners report - they have some good points there about SSIS, Pentaho and Talend.

If I had to chose between these three, I would probably pick SSIS if have to work with SQL Server and Pentaho for everything else.

SSIS 2012 is a huge improvement over 2008 R2 but still has a long way.

As for the test, it would be nice to see some typical ETL operations as well - try to sort 20MM file in Talend and when group by a few fields. This is then nightmares begin 🙂