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BigQuery vs IBM Db2 Warehouse comparison

 

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

BigQuery
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (3rd)
IBM Db2 Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (13th)
 

Featured Reviews

Luís Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Handles large data sets efficiently and offers flexible data management capabilities
The features I find most valuable in this solution are the ability to run and handle large data sets in a very efficient way with multiple types of data, relational as SQL data. It is kind of difficult to explain, but structured data and the ability to handle large data sets are key features. The data integration capabilities in BigQuery were, in fact, an issue at the beginning. There are two types of integrations. As long as integration is within Google, it is pretty simple. When you start to try to connect external clients to that data, it becomes more complex. It is not related to BigQuery, it is related to Google security model, which is not easy to manage. I would not call it an integration issue of BigQuery, I would call it an integration issue of Google security model.
Sherpard  Muzuva - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Manager- IBM Enterprise Systems at SYSTEMS INTEGRATED LTD (SYMPHONY)
Advanced features enhance business intelligence, but complex management calls for improved user guidance
While my experience with IBM Db2 Warehouse is somewhat limited, when compared to other databases such as Oracle, there are areas for improvement. They need to enhance the database to make it more user-friendly and easier to master. They should implement a more comprehensive graphical user interface with additional features. For instance, when users encounter problems, the system should provide better guidelines and troubleshooting directions, except for hardware-related issues. They need to implement tools that would help users perform basic troubleshooting rather than solely relying on support. Other databases have features where users can investigate specific issues using error codes. From my experience, many minor issues could be resolved before escalating to support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's straightforward to set up."
"The features I have found most valuable in BigQuery include the query cache, which is good and scales well; it handles huge amounts of data quite well, and the multi-regions feature works well."
"BigQuery can be used for any type of company. It has the capability of building applications and storing data. It can be used for OLTP or OLAP. It has many other products within the Google space."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to manage the database on the cloud."
"The setup is simple."
"The query tool is scalable and allows for petabytes of data."
"The interface is what I find particularly valuable."
"The product is serverless. We only need to write SQL queries to analyze the data. We need to pay based on the number of queries. The retrieval time is very less. Even if you write large queries, the tool is able to bring back data in a few seconds."
"Some of the best features are stored procedures, parallelism, and different indexing strategies."
"The standout feature of IBM Db2 Warehouse, which is particularly valuable for large enterprises, is its ability to handle big data."
"Some of the best features are stored procedures, parallelism, and different indexing strategies."
"The analytics engine is not bad at forecasting predictions."
"If you have good people designing how the data is stored, it's a marvelous tool."
"It's easy and practical to use."
"Provides good security and reliability."
"It can scale effectively as long as resources are available."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement in BigQuery is its UI because it's not working very well. Pricing for the solution is also very high."
"I noticed recently it's more expensive now."
"There are many tools that you have to use with BigQuery that are different services also provided for by Google. They need to all be integrated into BigQuery to make the solution easier to use."
"As a product, BigQuery still requires a lot of maturity to accommodate other use cases and to be widely acceptable across other organizations."
"The solution hinges on Google patterns so continued improvement is important."
"There is a good amount of documentation out there, but they're consistently making changes to the platform, and, like, their literature hasn't been updated on some plans."
"Some of the queries are complex and difficult to understand."
"It would be beneficial if BigQuery could be made more affordable."
"It takes a long time to have a new version or release, similar to Oracle."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support as a five. It is fairly bad."
"The biggest challenge anyone could have with Db2 Warehouse is their references or online resources and documentation. They are very, very, very limited on the web."
"IBM Db2 Warehouse needs to improve its interface."
"The areas of the solution that is needing the most improvement are separating compute from storage, elasticity, which means scaling up and then retracting."
"There were some initial challenges with IBM Db2 Warehouse about eight months ago when I worked in this environment. When I coordinated with IBM support, they mentioned that the memory was insufficient for our needs. Our business environment required significantly more memory than the previous cluster could provide. Consequently, we have worked closely with on-site IBM technical personnel to address this issue."
"The biggest problems we have is when the backup solution is failing or slow and we run out of log space, which has happened probably a couple of times in the last four years."
"The primary challenges customers face with IBM Db2 Warehouse are related to its complexity in usage. It requires highly skilled professionals who understand Db2, and both training and support are challenging to obtain."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is adaptable, ensuring that organizations can tailor their usage and costs based on their specific requirements and configurations within the Google Cloud Platform."
"Price-wise, I think that is very reasonable."
"We are above the free threshold, so we are paying around 40 euros per month for BigQuery."
"The price is a bit high but the technology is worth it."
"The product operates on a pay-for-use model. Costs include storage and query execution, which can accumulate based on data volume and complexity."
"The pricing appears to be competitive for the intended usage scenarios we have in mind."
"The price could be better. Usually, you need to buy the license for a year. Whenever you want more, you can subscribe to it, and you can use it. Otherwise, you can terminate the license. You can use it daily or monthly, and we use it based on a project's requirements."
"The pricing is good and there are no additional costs involved."
"In a traditional on-prem database, in a data warehouse, the solution is probably on the expensive side."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Media Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigQuery?
I believe the cost of BigQuery is competitive versus the alternatives in the market, but it can become expensive if the tool is not used properly. It is on a per-consumption basis, the billing, so ...
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
With what I have seen in BigQuery, I had some response times problems, but then it is an analytical database and not a transactional database, so it comes with eventual consistency. I cannot have e...
What is your primary use case for BigQuery?
We are mostly dealing with Google solutions such as BigQuery, NoSQL, SQL analytical database, secrets manager, and most of the serverless infrastructure as well, databases. I run SQL queries on Big...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Db2 Warehouse?
The pricing for medium and large environments is almost the same as Oracle. I rate the pricing as six out of ten.
What needs improvement with IBM Db2 Warehouse?
While my experience with IBM Db2 Warehouse is somewhat limited, when compared to other databases such as Oracle, there are areas for improvement. They need to enhance the database to make it more u...
What is your primary use case for IBM Db2 Warehouse?
The main advantages of IBM Db2 Warehouse become apparent when dealing with business intelligence applications. I worked with it when it was installed for one of our customers, a utilities company, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

BQ
InfoSphere Warehouse, IBM InfoSphere Warehouse
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Alameda County Social Services Agency, Sui Southern Gas Company Limited
Find out what your peers are saying about BigQuery vs. IBM Db2 Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.