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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

Mikah Sellers - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at Sgt Suds
Has supported detailed policy and education analysis with low-code data exploration
I do not use AWS as my main cloud provider within the company and am not currently using it with AWS. My company did not buy it through the AWS Marketplace as I'm the founder of the company. I do not use BigQuery's integration with Google Analytics for custom behavior analysis. I have not utilized the geospatial analysis capabilities with BigQuery as I'm doing mostly human capital work, so geospatial wouldn't make sense. I would rate their service on a scale of one to 10 for Google as ten. I would rate BigQuery as nine out of 10. My experience with the pricing for BigQuery was through a grant from Google. Their pricing is fairly priced and pretty comparable to Microsoft's offering. I haven't had direct experience, but I did look at the pricing of the Microsoft offering and it's pretty similar. I do not deal with Google AI tools such as Vertex.
Sherpard  Muzuva - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Manager 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

"Using BigQuery's central repository brings dispersed information together, which facilitates exploring the data and gaining insights, and consequently, it improves operations, response time, and the business overall."
"It's similar to a Hadoop cluster, except it's managed by Google."
"The most valuable aspect of BigQuery is its ability to handle high data workloads without causing friction with our online systems."
"BigQuery is a very nice product; it is a good product, scalable, and has high performance."
"Its integration with other tools like Atlan through a Google Chrome extension is highly beneficial."
"BigQuery excels at data analysis. It processes vast amounts of information using its advanced architecture and sophisticated querying capabilities, making it crucial for critical insights and safe for handling sensitive data."
"As a cloud solution, it's easy to set up."
"BigQuery allows for very fast access, and it is efficient in handling large datasets compared to other SQL databases."
"The most valuable features of IBM Db2 Warehouse include its availability, easy integration, ability to deal with a large size of data, excellent performance with no delays, powerful security mechanisms, and effective support."
"The solution works with big data, so it's pretty scalable."
"Provides good security and reliability."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"I think it scales really well and as long as you take enough time to learn a little bit about it, it works really well."
"It can be mounted on the cloud, which is a huge plus. If the client, for example, starts small with on-premise deployment and then it rapidly needs to grow, we can transfer this to the cloud easily."
 

Cons

"When I execute a query, the dashboard doesn't always present the output seamlessly. Troubleshooting requires opening each pipeline individually, which is time-consuming."
"There is a limitation when copying data directly from BigQuery; it only supports up to ten MB when copying data to the clipboard."
"The price could be better. Compared to competing solutions, BigQuery is expensive. It's only suitable for enterprise customers, not small and medium-sized businesses, as they cannot afford this kind of solution. In the next release, it would be better if they improved their AI bot. Although machine learning and artificial intelligence are doing wonders, there is still a lot of room to enhance them."
"The primary hurdle in this migration lies in the initial phase of moving substantial volumes of data to cloud-based platforms."
"For greater flexibility and ease of use, it would be beneficial if BigQuery offered more third-party add-ons and connectors, particularly for databases that don't have built-in integration options."
"Although BigQuery is completely managed on cloud, one has to use many services of BigQuery and GCP in order to create the end-to-end data setup."
"To be very specific, here in the Middle East, I'm based out of the UAE, and Google has a very narrow footprint, a very limited footprint here in the region."
"An area for improvement in BigQuery is its UI because it's not working very well. Pricing for the solution is also very high."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Db2 Warehouse needs to improve its interface."
"I previously used DataStage, which I think is better than InfoSphere Warehouse."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support as a five. It is fairly bad."
"The areas of the solution that is needing the most improvement are separating compute from storage, elasticity, which means scaling up and then retracting."
"Lacks sufficient documentation and particularly in Spanish."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is inexpensive."
"The pricing is good and there are no additional costs involved."
"The solution's pricing is cheaper compared to other solutions."
"I have tried my own setup using my Gmail ID, and I think it had a $300 limit for free for a new user. That's what Google is offering, and we can register and create a project."
"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."
"BigQuery is inexpensive."
"1 TB is free of cost monthly. If you use more than 1 TB a month, then you need to pay 5 dollars extra for each TB."
"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%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Media Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
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, ...
 

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 Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.