I was using Pentaho Data Integration even before Pentaho bought it and call it that. I have the last free version.
I went on their website recently to see if they had released another version only to find out my favorite open source etl is not much open anymore and not quite free.
Does any of you know of alternatives in affordable, easy to use ETL tools?
Isn't Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration Community Edition) still available without licensing fees?
Kettle 4.1 was released to the community as a stable release in fourth quarter of 2010. The community is currently working on a minor patch release to 4.1. Kettle continues to be a community supported product. Kettle may be a more appropriate tool in your sandbox or development environments.
However, in a production environment you may find that PDI Enterprise Edition with technical support from Pentaho more appropriate for your mission critical systems.
After discussion in comments below: Pentaho Data Integration (PDI - ak "Kettle") is still maintained (4.4 was release 2012-09) and Open Source. It can be downloaded from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Data%20Integration
You could take a look at Talend Open Studio. The development environment runs inside of Eclipse, and there are many different kinds of database connectors & transformations. Also, given that it is an open source project, you can build your own connectors & transformations to share with other users (even commercial users) of Talend.
This is more developer-centric than DBA centric, but I've heard good things about Rhino ETL. https://github.com/ayende/rhino-etl
I haven't used it because I use SSIS for my ETL needs, but have you checked out expressor Studio?
You could also check out ReactiveETL which is a rewrite of RhinoETL on CodePlex
If you are in an environment that is using SQL Server, you should have access to SSIS which is included with SQL Server and is able to attach to other databases using OLEDB or ODBC connections, so it doesn't have to be connecting to SQL Server in order to use it.
There have even been some presentations on using Powershell for ETL, one such presentation was put on by the App Dev Virtual Chapter of PASS.
For more details on that presentation check out the following link:
I played with Aptar a bit a number of years ago. I can't say how well they've stood the test of time, though.
Depending on what you're trying to do Mirth Connect might be suitable, though it is more of a messaging engine than an ETL tool.
