Matillion

Fig 03 - Features supported by Matillion in target environments

Matillion’s primary strength and major differentiator lies in the tightness of its integration with its target environments. Some of the significant capabilities it supports are highlighted in Figure 3. While excellent for supported environments, which will include Databricks in the next release, implementing such depth of capability also explains why Matillion does not support more targets as, obviously, there is a significant investment in each target: it is not simply a question of building a connector. However, it also limits the use of Matillion. If, for example, you are an existing Teradata customer that wants to migrate to Teradata Vantage in the cloud then Matillion wouldn’t be the supplier to choose. That said, the company is starting to introduce what it calls “tactical output connectors”. The first of these is for Salesforce, with Intercom, Oracle and SQL Server to follow. Support for cloud object storage, such as Amazon S3, is provided.

In practice, the way that Matillion works is to generate SQL. It makes extensive use of dynamic variables in order to minimise any required code regeneration (needed, for example, whenever there are schema changes), which is the biggest downside of any code generating tool. Other notable points are that, while Matillion itself does not provide change data capture it does support technologies such as Snowflake Streams, which provide equivalent functionality. There is a built-in scheduler or you can define listeners that will trigger jobs when required.

Compared to some traditional data integration vendors Matillion has the advantage that it is cloud-native, with all that that implies. More specifically, its integration with supported targets is of greater depth than you would normally get from competitive suppliers. The support for application-based sources is extensive. And because of the free data loader, Matillion ETL is suited to both new implementations of these data warehouses as well as for use where companies are migrating to these environments. That said, all the traditional data warehousing vendors are introducing, or have already introduced, cloud-based versions of their various products. While much of the buzz about cloud data warehouses over the last few years has been about the targets that are currently supported by Matillion, we don’t expect this to last. We would therefore like to see an acceleration in Matillion’s support for other warehouses and data lakes.

The Bottom Line

Matillion is a pure-play ELT vendor with excellent support for the environments it targets. If that fits your requirements it is worth serious consideration. Indeed, it should definitely be in your shortlist.