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Actian ParAccel vs Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Actian ParAccel
Ranking in Data Warehouse
24th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Parallel Data War...
Ranking in Data Warehouse
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Actian ParAccel is 2.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is 3.6%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse3.6%
Actian ParAccel2.1%
Other94.3%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

it_user263409 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
​The stability needs work and the leader node should be removed, but we can deliver results faster.
The speed of the application It has delivered results to our customers faster than we were able to previously. The stability needs work. I've used it for two years. It wasn't stable. There are issues. No issues yet. Customer Service: It's good. Technical Support: It's good. SQL Server…
reviewer2254953 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Desk Administrator at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Virtual machines have handled large data and supported growth but pricing still needs improvement
I believe the product is pretty fast. When I have used it, it is handy. The integration with other Azure products is good and integrates well. Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse's security measures help ensure our sensitive data protection during analysis through measures such as encryption. Its scalability is impressive as it scales up and down really well. We go from a couple of users to tons of users all the time, and it scales and handles things really well. One of the major benefits with this product is that it's Microsoft, which is one of the best ones, and it's just plug and play.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It has delivered results to our customers faster than we were able to previously."
"It is very strong, scalable, and has tons of features."
"SQL Data Warehouse provides our organization with a way to access all corporate data in a uniform way."
"This is a great product for big data analytics as it can challenge other MPPs quite well."
"Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse integrates beautifully with other Microsoft ecosystem products."
"These separate database servers were turned into a massively parallel, shared nothing database system that offered incredibly good performance, especially under complex mixed workloads."
"With PDW’s Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) design, queries run in minutes instead of hours, and in seconds instead of minutes in comparison to Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) databases."
"I'm very pro Microsoft because I think Microsoft products are highly intuitive and are widely used."
"This solution helps the higher levels of the organization because they have better visibility of the whole company, which helps with decision making in terms of what should be improved or implemented."
 

Cons

"The stability needs work."
"We'd like to see it be a bit more compatible with other solutions."
"There could be improvements on the cost side of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse because it is still considered to be quite expensive by a lot of users, and many companies are not interested in solutions with parallel data warehousing due to this expense."
"The performance could be improved because the query is slow if we don't optimize it. And even if we optimize it, sometimes it still runs very slow."
"There were scalability issues in that there is a limit to 32 concurrent queries."
"The pricing could be better; I think it actually just went up."
"Sometimes, the product requires rolling back to its previous version during a software update. This particular area could be enhanced."
"It could be made more user-friendly for business users which would increase the user base."
"The product must provide more frequent updates."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"They offer an annual subscription. The pricing depends on the size of the environments."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The tool could be expensive if we need to manage a lot of data."
"Technical support is an additional fee and is expensive."
"All the features that we use do not require any additional subscription or yearly fees."
"Microsoft has an agreement with the government in our country, so our customers get their licensing costs from the Ministry. Whenever we work with any government, company, or government institute, which is mainly what we are doing, that license comes directly from the Ministry of Technology and Information."
"I think the program is well-priced compared to the other offerings that are out in the market."
"The solution's pricing is fairly decent for organizations with huge data sizes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise22
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
The pricing could be better; I think it actually just went up.
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
The basic use case for us is virtual machines. In real estate, we use it for our operations. They handle large data sets well, and the performance is good during those times.
 

Also Known As

ParAccel
Microsoft PDW, SQL Server Data Warehouse, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, MS Parallel Data Warehouse
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon, The Royal Bank of Scotland, OfficeMax, MicroStrategy
Auckland Transport, Erste Bank Group, Urban Software Institute, NJVC, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Tata Steel Europe
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.