Recently I have been asked by my company to make a case for open-source ETL-data integration tools as an alternative for the commercial data integration tool, Informatica PowerCenter.
So I did a lot of research and I'm going to try my best, considering I have never used the open-source tools nor the commercial one.

I found plenty of information about comparisons between Pentaho Kettle and Talend, which were 2 of the open-source tools I was supposed to research.
Now, without getting in a big arguement (or matt casters posting on my blog), I'd like to attempt to compare the two, very briefly.
And again, this is ONLY from the research I did online and not based on my experience using the tools (since I dont really have any).


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Since we released our first Beta, we have been working on various examples to demonstrate the capabilities and benefits of a resource oriented approach to data integration.

One of the examples we have been working on is a data mart for SugarCRM opportunity analysis. We have now published that example on our content download site, packages.snaplogic.org , where you can download it, and try it out. (You will also need a SnapLogic server installation, to run the pipelines.)

The general idea behind data marts is simple – they are subject specific alternatives to a full blown data warehouse. The primary benefits of using a separate database to analyze an operational system are the ability to look at a snapshot of the constantly changing data, and the offloading of the queries to a separate database which is optimized for analysis using a star schema instead of a normalized …