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In my current job I use Informatica Cloud, which either by itself or in combination with other Informatica products can do these things. I have two main complai
by muraiki 10y ago
In my current job I use Informatica Cloud, which either by itself or in combination with other Informatica products can do these things. I have two main complaints about it:
1. The UX is subpar. It insists on running in only a single tab at a time, and attempts to open multiple tabs will instead override whatever it considers to be the master tab. This is a huge pain, because I often need to have a mapping workflow open in one window and some other relevant part of the application open in another. Instead I have to save, go find the thing I want, and go back. Another problem is that when working with data sources containing tons of fields, there's no easy way to search.
2. It offers an expression language to perform some computational tasks, similar to what you'd find in Excel, but it's hamstrung by a poor UI and a limited amount of functions. The built-in editor for expressions is really poor (see Tableau for an example of a great editor for a simple Excel-like language; it even has type linting) and, unless I've misunderstood something, you can't declare any variables so you end up with huge nested expressions. There aren't many functions available, so something as simple as removing whitespace ends up as lstrip(rstrip(foo)). In combination with no support for statements (or at least a let expression like in lisp) this makes any nontrivial data munging completely indecipherable.
I've looked around in this space and it seems like there are a variety of products, but the supplier of our main CRM will only support Informatica Cloud. I think that a company that can offer a product that does what you've said but makes a serious effort at UX could cause users to revolt and demand to use it! I know the joke is that Slack is just a pretty IRC with better UX... but that's exactly why it has become so successful.
In terms of data munging, take a look at Microsoft's Power BI. It's visualization software but it has a nice data munging mode that, crucially, keeps track of all the changes you make and displays them in a linear format. This is great for getting a quick idea as to what was done with the data and is essential for doing reproducible data analyses. Unfortunately, Power BI also suffers from poor UX in insisting on tiny fonts and gray-on-gray palettes that are totally unreadable to anyone over 30.