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BigQuery vs IBM Db2 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

BigQuery
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (2nd)
IBM Db2 Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2807520 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Data processing has become faster and large analytical queries run reliably at multi‑region scale
The features I have found most valuable in BigQuery include the query cache, which is good and scales well. We have not seen problems with scaling. It handles huge amounts of data quite well, and the multi-regions feature works well. To measure the effectiveness of BigQuery, I think it is quite good. The metrics I use to evaluate BigQuery's effectiveness include that scaling is quite good and handling of big amounts of data. We do not see any glitches, and we do not see major timeouts. Google platform in general has been quite stable, and we do not see that many outages at resource level or at overall zonal level.
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

"What I like most about BigQuery is that it's fast and flexible. Another advantage of BigQuery is that it's easy to learn."
"The most valuable features of BigQuery is that it supports standard SQL and provides good performance."
"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."
"The feature called calibrating the capacity is valuable."
"BigQuery has a very nice interface that you can easily learn if you know SQL."
"We like the machine learning features and the high-performance database engine."
"BigQuery allows for very fast access, and it is efficient in handling large datasets compared to other SQL databases."
"The initial setup process is easy."
"It can scale effectively as long as resources are available."
"The initial setup was really easy; it's Docker compliant, you just pull the image from the IBM repository and that's it, and the deployment must have taken less than an hour, making it really fast to have it completely working."
"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."
"The solution works with big data, so it's pretty scalable."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"The analytics engine is not bad at forecasting predictions."
 

Cons

"For a small use case, it is really reliable and accurate, but for larger environments having enterprise data, it can be a little bit tricky, and I cannot really trust the outcome that the AI model gives, so I need to also verify it before executing in my real environment."
"We'd like to see more local data residency."
"The price is a bit high but the technology is worth it."
"There are some limitations in the query latency compared to what it was three years ago."
"The primary hurdle in this migration lies in the initial phase of moving substantial volumes of data to cloud-based platforms."
"The solution should reduce its pricing."
"Some of the queries are complex and difficult to understand."
"I noticed recently it's more expensive now."
"It takes a long time to have a new version or release, similar to Oracle."
"IBM Db2 Warehouse needs to improve its interface."
"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."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support as a five. It is fairly bad."
"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."
"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."
"In terms of improvement, IBM Db2 Warehouse should be more scalable."
"There should be more material available for training and training should be free."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a bit high but the technology is worth it."
"Price-wise, I think that is very reasonable."
"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."
"The product operates on a pay-for-use model. Costs include storage and query execution, which can accumulate based on data volume and complexity."
"BigQuery pricing can increase quickly. It's a high-priced solution."
"The solution is pretty affordable and quite cheap in comparison to PDP or Cloudera."
"One terabyte of data costs $20 to $22 per month for storage on BigQuery and $25 on Snowflake. Snowflake is costlier for one terabyte, but BigQuery charges based on how much data is inserted into the tables. BigQuery charges you based on the amount of data that you handle and not the time in which you handle it. This is why the pricing models are different and it becomes a key consideration in the decision of which platform to use."
"We are above the free threshold, so we are paying around 40 euros per month for BigQuery."
"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
14%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Media Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise21
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?
The queries that BigQuery provides are not optimized at a greater level. For simple tasks it is good, but if I want to write complex analyzing queries, it doesn't give the queries up to the mark, s...
What is your primary use case for BigQuery?
My main use case for BigQuery is the analysis of our data, creating dashboards from large datasets, and querying the databases that we have, including both structured and unstructured data imported...
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
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