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IBM Netezza Performance Server vs Spark SQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

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

IBM Netezza Performance Server
Ranking in Hadoop
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (12th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of IBM Netezza Performance Server is 6.1%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Spark SQL5.3%
IBM Netezza Performance Server6.1%
Other88.6%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

Shiv Subramaniam Koduvayur - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at MAF Retail
Parallel data processing streamlines operations while cost and cloud integration challenge adoption
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only available in AWS, and in the Middle East, it is not well-developed in the Azure environment. For the cost to be reduced, it should match competitors. Many features need to be incorporated on the cloud.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Parallel data processing is a significant feature for me."
"The underlying hardware that IBM provides with this appliance is made for a specific purpose, to serve performance on a large amount of data, and to do analytics as well."
"ROI is high because analyst productivity improved drastically."
"The need for administration involvement is quite limited on the solution."
"Billions of data are processed within an optimal amount of time, and it supports almost real-time analytics."
"The speed has been excellent for us, in pulling information, as well as the batch timing, and the suite of tools that comes with it for the ETL with IBM InfoSphere."
"The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format."
"There is quick implementation and considerable outcomes which make the platform a valuable asset to the organization."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The performance is one of the most important features. It has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"The speed of getting data."
"Speed is the major benefit of using Spark SQL."
"This solution is a much more scalable and adventurous solution."
"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
 

Cons

"Netezza does not scale like other databases, so it cannot run several queries at once."
"I'm not sure of IBM's roadmap currently, as the solution is coming up on its end of life."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server could improve its interface, support for big data, and APA-based connectivity should be available."
"The query optimization is crap, and the machine could use more alerting around bad design and bad queries."
"If the demand for clock or disk space grow over the limit, it will be necessary to change the appliance, because it's not possible to upgrade any component of this machine."
"Netezza does not perform well with a significant volume of individual record operations."
"We tried to install a newer version of NZA not supported by the version of Netezza we had and it did not work."
"The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because, early on, there were a couple of maintenance things that we had to do."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
"In the next update, we'd like to see better performance for small points of data. It is possible but there are better tools that are faster and cheaper."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"Netezza is a costly solution. It does serve a specific purpose but it's costlier than what's available in the market, if you go to the cloud."
"For me, mainly, it reduces my costs. It's not only the appliance cost. There are also support costs and a maintenance costs. It does reduce the costs very drastically."
"The annual licensing fees are twenty-two percent of the product cost."
"The pricing is very expensive. It has a lot CPUs with a lot of components in it. It also has built-in redundancy for resiliency reasons."
"Expensive to maintain compared to other solutions."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
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Comparison Review

it_user232068 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 5, 2015
Netezza vs. Teradata
Original published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-i-choose-net Two leading Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architectures for Data Warehousing (DW) are IBM PureData System for Analytics (formerly Netezza) and Teradata. I thought talking about the similarities and differences…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
University
12%
Retailer
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise33
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only availab...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The solution has generally received positive feedback from me and is recommended for continued use by end users. However, the product cost is high compared to others in the market, and this cost ha...
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Also Known As

Netezza Performance Server, Netezza, Netezza Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Seattle Childrens Hospital, Carphone Warehouse, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Battelle, Start Today Co. Ltd., Kelley Blue Book, Trident Marketing, Elisa Corporation, Catalina Marketing, iBasis, Barnes & Noble, Qualcomm, MediaMath, Acxiom, iBasis, Foxwoods
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Netezza Performance Server vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.