There’s no denying that production databases are critical for achieving business success, with use cases ranging from storing product and user events to backend systems for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. The best practice to make use of this data is to centralize it in one place to provide context to and for your other systems, often done through an ETL process or tool.

Below, we cover differences between Qlik Replicate, formerly known as Attunity, and Fivetran.

Source Support

Attunity was created primarily for database replication, which is evident in its native support for relational and NoSQL databases. Fivetran supports many of those same databases, with more data sources being developed every day. Fivetran offers 150+ natively supported sources including popular SaaS applications as well.

Software Installation and Hosting

Founded in 1988, Attunity displays remnants of its legacy setup in its interface and also has prerequisites to get started, such as setting up a server for installation and runtime of the software. You’ll need to monitor the server usage to accommodate your ongoing data volume fluctuations. In comparison, Fivetran is a cloud-native SaaS application that requires no installation, and can power your ETL and database replication needs directly via a web portal.

Change Data Capture (CDC) Streaming

Both Attunity and Fivetran offer Change Data Capture support in terms of using database logs  to understand what corresponding tables to update in the destination, but the Fivetran processing methodology varies a bit. Attunity creates staging tables in the destination to stream log transactions into, and then utilizes the warehouse processing to merge these staging tables into the actual destination tables. This can result in increased costs on the destination, both in terms of storage and compute. In comparison, Fivetran runs query deduplication natively as part of our change-sorting process to minimize overhead on your destination environment.

Fivetran also provides support for Slowly Changing Dimensions Type 2 by merit of our new History Mode offering, which simply requires a flip of a switch to instantly enable your specified tables so that you have a record of every change made to every row of data for historical analysis.

Vendor Ecosystem and Independence

As referenced above, in 2019, Qlik acquired Attunity, which indicated future plans to integrate their products. With Fivetran, we partner with a broad variety of technologies, meaning that you can freely choose your best-of-breed tools that best fit your data integration use cases.

If you’re interested in seeing how Fivetran works in your environment, we offer a free 14-day trial. Your 14-day trial counter doesn’t start until you’ve completed your initial historical sync consisting of all data available in your source at the time, so we recommend signing up as soon as possible to familiarize yourself with our application.