MettleCI’s Git integration is superior to IBM’s in a number of ways.
- MettleCI provides integration with any 'flavour' of Git (Bitbucket, GitHub hosted, GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, Azure DevOps, plain old command-line Git, and so on) while IBM is still constrained to vendor-specific interfaces, such as GitHub and Bitbucket (emerging).
- MettleCI uses the ISX format to package all of the design-time information relevant to a Job when interacting with Git. IBm have only moved to a single ISX-per-job v1.7.1, and previously threw a collection of files into Git for each Job. Customers are left unclear about IBM's intended deployment strategy for their Git files, and still face some hard constraints on code portability between environments.
- MettleCI provides Git integration for DataStage versions as far back as 8.X. IBM do not and we believe they never will for any version older than the 11.7 series. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why we can automate upgrades to later versions and IBM has therefore bundled MettleCI into a new UG&I Lab Services (AKA Data & AI Cloud Labs) package called Rapid DataStage Upgrades.
In summary, the DFD’s Git integration appears to be more “ticking the Git box” rather than providing what existing DataStage developers and release management people actually need to adopt modern SDLC disciplines (and benefits) in a holistic way.