Liked the article. I too was an MS only person for about 15 years. But, have expanded to much more in the last 3-4 years or so (IBM DataStage, Informatica, and Talend). Just getting into Talend for last 1 year, and like it a lot.

Think the author is trying to get an apples to apples comparison. Though it might be better to have both tools write to a separate database instance as the target (maybe Oracle or DB2 to make it neutral) as most ETL will write to a RDBMS target.

The biggest thing missing for me is, both tests should be run as scheduled jobs and not using the designer. They will behave much differently when not run through the GUI. The comments about requiring tuning the server or OS for Talend, think are not that import, they are 1 time steps that usually our infrastructure people know how to tune for java/linux. We’re not talking about some tuning you have to do inside each job, just the server as a whole.

Talend has a lot of benefits, including tons of unique components (with more functionality added each release) that would be hard to do the same thing in SSIS.