All,
Our company has just selected Business Objects as our BI partner and DI is one of the products that we are purchasing. I have used BO v5 and v6, but I have no prior experience on DI. Instead, I used DataStage and Informatica at my previous job.
I am just curious to know what are your comments on DI and how does it stack up with DataStage and Informatica?
Thank you very much.
substring 
(BOB member since 2004-01-16)
It is not a short and easy answer. Answe depends on several factors including what type of source systems you have, what are you trying to accomplish and so on. Only comment is DI is an open ended ETL tool with some cool real time features.
If you want, I can send you a document comparing DI with other ETL tools in a POC.
DJ00 (BOB member since 2005-06-15)
While no tool is perfect, the perception I get is that DI does indeed hold its own against other ETL tools. The one area it may have a leg up (especially now) is against SAP data sources. The Acta product (Acta was purchased by Business Objects) had a niche in SAP, if I remember correctly.
The largest benefit comes from being integrated with the rest of the Business Objects suite. Don’t get too taken in by the “automatic universe generation part,” but the “lineage” part is probably the best feature. Being able to trace a data element from the originial source, through every transformation, to the data warehouse, then to every Crystal / BusObj report is a powerful feature. The SOXA folks in the company will LOVE that part!
Dwayne Hoffpauir (BOB member since 2002-09-19)
(due end of Q3?)
Werner Daehn 
(BOB member since 2004-12-17)
Thanks for all the great comments. 
DJ00, if it is not too much trouble, please send me the document you were talking about. My email is: substring0@hotmail.com
Thanks.
substring (BOB member since 2004-01-16)
Agreed - the universe generation stuff isn’t useful, but Lineage is very helpful. If we could get our users to save their FC BO documents in the repository instead of their local file systems, that is. 
dnewton (BOB member since 2004-01-30)
Fancy sharing?
Nick Daniels 
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
I would love to but I am not allowed to do so. Please contact your BO sales rep and ask for a Statement of Direction for the next version. He should be able to get that for you under NDA. It gives you a vage idea at least…
Werner Daehn (BOB member since 2004-12-17)
Could you send that document to me as well, please?
srinivas_t (BOB member since 2007-11-25)
Well, that was 2 years ago – DI has evolved quite a bit, as I’m sure the competing products have. It might not be relevant any more.
dnewton (BOB member since 2004-01-30)
that makes sense too…but I’m a beginner in DWH…and I started working with BODI XI…
I’ve chances of movin to Informatica or something like that…
so…I would appreciate if someone can direct me to this kind of document that you were talking about in your prevoius posts(2 years back:P)
srinivas_t (BOB member since 2007-11-25)