Matillion is presented to the public as an all-encompassing SaaS solution in the form of a cloud data integration platform.
It is said to handle the full length of the data integration process, from acquisition and ingestion all the way to transformation.
Matillion leverages the strength of your cloud environment to transform the data you possess if you see fit. Matillion has two flagship products, Matillion ETL and Matillion Data Loader. Matillion Data loader is strictly used for moving data. On the other hand, Matillion ETL is Matillion’s flagship product. It is a more robust ETL solution. Both offer a detailed level of configuration for advanced users.
Here are five more interesting facts to keep in mind about Matillion
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1. Matillion Data Loader
Matillion Data Loader is a free solution that Matillion offers to its customers to help pull data from source systems and load it into data warehouses.
Keep in mind that being that Matillion Data Loader is free; you will also get what you don’t pay for, which is fewer features.
An example of what is lacking with Matillion Data Loader is that you won’t be able to perform any transformations.
In addition to that, Matillion Data Loader only supports about 35 connectors and does not seem to have support for Delta Lake or Azure Synapse if you were using them as a destination for your data.
But Matillion Data Loader does support Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery.
Simply put, Matillion Data Loader offers a basic wizard to put together data pipelines for extracting and loading your data. But you won’t find any additional developer tools or automation capabilities.
2. Pre-Built Connectors
Matillion’s Matillion ETL currently has over 100 pre-built connectors for numerous data sources, and at the moment, it supports Amazon Redshift, Azure, Delta Lake, Google Bigquery, Snowflake, and Synapse as destinations.
Along with pre-built connectors, users can create their own tailor-made connectors to any REST API source system.
3. Prioritizes Enterprise Customers
It mostly has enterprise customers and puts less emphasis on SMB/mid-market companies.
4. Scaling Issues
When businesses don’t focus on growing and expanding, that is basically just waiting to become a small fish in a bigger pond. Unfortunately, It’s users could find themselves in a situation where there are scaling issues, and they may have difficulty finding the answers.
It is more of an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution than a SaaS solution because it supplies customers with a platform to enable data integration, but users have to do the heavy lifting and set everything up.
It is a data orchestration platform that makes it possible to coordinate the execution and monitoring of your data pipelines and workflows, but it just doesn’t scale very well.
Setting up these data pipelines can make workflows more complex, and when errors occur, they will have to be addressed by the user’s team, adding obstacles to expansion.
5. Reverse ETL Issues
To make a long story short, Matillion specializes in ELT, but unfortunately not reverse ETL.
What is Reverse ETL? This is the process of copying data from the data warehouse, which should be the standard of truth for your organization, to operational systems of record, including SaaS tools used for growth, marketing, sales, and support.
Yet, the information that is stored in the data warehouse should be made available to whomever in your organization has the opportunity to properly leverage it for the greater good of the organization.
Reverse ETL tools like Hightouch are able to take the transformed data out of your data warehouse, sync it back into the native tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Marketo, that may be used by your business teams, leverage all of the data models built in your warehouse and push it to the destination you choose.
Additional Facts
Being that everything is low code, you can leverage Matillion’s graphical UI to construct orchestration jobs to build refined ETL pipelines and transformation jobs inside of Matillion by picking from over 30 components to establish large-volume transformation workflows.
Every job in Matillion can be scheduled to run at a specific time or a regular interval depending on your needs. You can also create generic jobs which can be reused across different projects.
Matillion provides users with the ability to stage their data inside your own cloud environment, with the ability to send alerts and notifications directly to email or Slack, and after your jobs are organized and scheduled in Matillion, everything is then fully automated.
At the end of the day, cloud data warehouses help power business intelligence and analytics, but they do little to leverage and democratize that data for day-to-day operations to improve the overall customer experience. This is the exact reason Reverse ETL is so valuable.