Most of my company uses powercenter informatica for Extract-Transform-Load type data move jobs between databases.
However project I am on has a big custom Perl job with some Java thrown in for good measure to move data and trigger some other updates.
There is talk of rewriting the thing to use powercenter instead, what are people's experiences on such a project, does it make sense? Seems like you trade lot of flexibility in going to such a "off the shelf" solution, but do the ETL tools buy you much in terms of productivity for example?
Informatica is good for an operations team. It allows a non-technical person the ability to monitor and re-run jobs. However, it makes about any task much more complicated than it needs to be. It's a huge piece of software, and takes a while to learn, and it's limited in the transformations it can do without programming. I'd certainly use Perl or a programming language any day over an "Enterprise ETL" tool.