IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is an advanced data warehouse offering that provides flexible deployment options and seamless integration, crucial for dynamic data-driven operations in today's market.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud | 2.0% |
| Snowflake | 15.1% |
| Databricks | 9.7% |
| Other | 73.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 25 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 26 |
IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud delivers robust performance and scalability, making it ideal for handling high data volumes with ease. Its cloud-native architecture ensures consistent reliability, catering to industries with ever-evolving demands for data analytics. Users benefit from a pay-as-you-go model, eliminating the need to maintain physical infrastructure while benefiting from continuous updates and improvements. The platform's robust capabilities support diverse and adaptable analytic workloads, providing critical business insights at speed.
What are the key features of IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud?IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is implemented across industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, where complex data environments and large-scale analytics demand robust and flexible architectures. Its ability to handle diverse data sets and provide actionable insights swiftly makes it indispensable in sectors where timely data interpretation is critical to operations and strategy development.
IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud was previously known as IBM dashDB .
Copenhagen Business School, BPM Northwest, GameStop
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Database Engineer at Meezan Bank | 4.0 | We primarily use IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud for data storage and analytics. We find the data dumping into the raw zone and BigQuery features valuable. However, there are limitations in adding data files and regional support improvements are needed. |
| Digital System Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees | 2.5 | We find Db2 Warehouse has significant scalability and availability issues, becoming a single point of failure under high query volume. Its support is also unsatisfactory, leading us to consider migrating to Oracle. I do not recommend it. |
| Business Unit technical Lead at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 3.5 | We value this solution's scalability and Netezza migration ease, but find support for ESX VMware poor, along with frequent container corruption and a broken backup option. Customer service is awful, with tickets open for weeks. |
| Managing Consultant at Quaterne | 4.5 | I've used dashDB for two years, finding it incredibly fast due to compression and efficient data handling. Setup was straightforward, and scalability has been great. Support is knowledgeable, though I sometimes struggled for resolution. Overall, it's a strong, continuously improving managed cloud service. |
| Senior Business Intelligence Consultant / Engagement Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I value this cloud DBMS for enabling a full IBM stack. Setup was easy, and it's stable after initial licensing issues. However, support and documentation need improvement, and I rate technical support 7/10. |
| Client Engagement Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I appreciate dashDB's high performance, data compression, and integrated tools like RStudio, which streamlined our analytics. While deployment and support were good, I found its lack of auto-scaling and upgrade downtimes a significant drawback. |
| Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I value dashDB's DB2 foundation for cloud data hubs, outsourcing maintenance. Initial connection issues occurred, and support was average. I desire better backup retention and AD authentication, advising users to consider cloud limitations carefully. |
Our primary use case is data storage and analytics.
The organization has decided to purchase a full stack solution from IBM due to positive responses, which helped them upgrade from the previous version.
There are some limitations in adding data files to table spaces, and improvements are needed for regional support.
I have used the solution for two years.
It is stable when there is support from IBM. There is a nine out of ten rating for stability due to 24/7 support in regions like North America.
I consider it a highly scalable product, rating it eight out of ten.
The technical support is very good, with a reliable 24/7 service. However, support quality varies by region, with American regions offering more stable and professional support.
Positive
We considered Teradata. We chose IBM as they transfer knowledge and documentation to customers, unlike Teradata.
We work with other vendors like Oracle and additionally use Oracle hardware and other databases like PostgreSQL.
We have a full stack team, including departments like network, network security, information security, application operations, and database.
I recommend IBM because it provides documentation and knowledge transfer, unlike Teradata. IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is viewed positively compared to Oracle and SQL Server.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
This is part of our Data Warehouse solution and it is set up as a two-node cluster.
The performance is okay as long as the volume of queries is not too high.
We have been facing some challenges with Db2 when scaling up the operations in terms of availability. It becomes a single point of failure and it pollutes the whole system, leaving us challenges in serving the traffic. This is the reason that we are considering migrating to Oracle.
We have been using Db2 Warehouse for three years.
Scalability has been a problem area. We have traffic on the order of gigabytes and it impacts our queries and responses a lot. Considering the volume that we have, it manifests itself into a multitude of issues.
We have dealt with technical support on several occasions. Whenever we run into issues, the specialist team is involved and the resolution cycle is stretched. We have to rely on make-shift solutions and the issues keep recurring. Ultimately, the product itself has challenges and we are not currently satisfied with the support, either.
Our deployment cycle was approximately six to seven months.
We worked with our technology solutions provider to implement Db2, and we have an in-house team as well. We received assistance from IBM and the team faced a lot of challenges with the full IBM stack.
We are currently in the process of evaluating migration from Db2 to Oracle.
Db2 is not a solution that I recommend. We have a lot of experience and we are not satisfied with the product or the support that we received. Because of the way our environment works, serving branches, it becomes a challenge to satisfy the customers or users.
I would rate this solution a five out of ten.
The warehouse DB/dashDB implementation scales a lot better that IBM BLU does. It will also be MPP, so performance should improve.
Ease of migration from Netezza DB. IBM ported over all Netezza's functionality and made the warehouse DB/dashDB the best of breed of the two.
Right now, we are implementing on ESX VMware 6.0. Support for this platform is poor. Also, one of the backup/recovery options is broken and IBM is not addressing the issue.
Yes, containers get corrupted very easily. Restoring them using GPFS can result in a lot of issues.
No scalability issues.
The way that it scales will help a lot of customers that are stuck with Netezza boxes that can't grow any larger.
Tech support for dashDB is awful. We usually have tickets open for three to four weeks.
This database will be a replacement of an IBM BLU database. We are migrating several TBs worth of data.
We used ESX VMware 6.0. IBM does not really understand this product or the setup process for sharing disks.
Not sure yet.
If your going to go with warehouse DB/dashDB, use the cloud or Sailfish version.
No.
IBM has taken a new approach to database technology.
One of the most amazing features of dashDB is how it uses compression to get results in lighting speed. dashDB uses advanced processing which doesn't require the entire dataset to fit in memory.
Prefetching of data: Has the ability to anticipate and "prefetch" data just before it's needed and to automatically adapt to keep necessary data in, or close, to the CPU.
No Decompression Required: dashDB preserves the order of data and performs a broad range of operations including joins and predicate evaluations on compressed data, without the need for decompression, drastically speeding the processing of data.
Data Skipping: dashDB's BLU acceleration automatically determines which data would not qualify for analysis within a particular query, enabling large chunks of data to be skipped.
I believe that many organizations need to look at how they are servicing their customers. dashDB doesn't necessarily replace your existing infrastructure. However, as an add-on, you can now expand your overall operations and performance goals.
Every product has room for improvement. This is one of the most important things that comes to mind about IBM and their mind set when it comes to managing customers using dashDB.
As a fully managed cloud service, the day-to-day backend of maintaining dashDB is taken care of for you. This is not only limited to whatever fix packs may or may not be applied (these actually become irrelevant because you never know that that they have occurred until you read the tech docs), but also the versioning.
With dashDB, IBM engineers and developers are continuously building new functionality, compatibility and integrations into the product and for you; this happens automatically
I have been using dashDB for about two years now. I have seen the progression of the software and service and it has been amazing to see.
We did have stability issues. Of course, I believe that all of the issues were self-induced. IBM support was able to advise, as well as modify, my instance of dashDB in order for maximum performance.
We have not had scalability issues. I tried to anticipate this. However, IBM has you covered in this respect as it is dedicated.
I would rate the level of dashDB support 3.5/5. While they are very knowledgeable in many areas, you can still struggle to get the correct resolution.
I have used multiple legacy databases, such as MS SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2. While there is still, and will be, a need for the traditional RDBMS, there is a new breed of database technology erupting in the market place. dashDB is a logical choice for any consumer.
The setup of dashDB is very straightforward. To be honest, you can have an instance of the database up and running in less than 10 minutes.
Do your research before signing up. There are many options when it comes to dashDB and you should try to anticipate growth. However, with compression, I find most can leverage the 1TB dedicated environment.
I didn't look at alternatives. I have been blue washed!
My advice is to find a good partner of IBM's in order to help implement. There can be many unknowns and you want to make sure you research prior to any implementation.
The cloud DBMS solution is most valuable to us.
Since my company is an IBM partner, it has enabled us to offer cloud data warehouse solutions on a 100% IBM stack.
The support channels need to improve. Also the documentation is a bit light.
I have used this solution for around nine months.
In the very beginning, we had some stability issues but that was more due to a misunderstanding on the licensing side than due to the platform itself. Since then, it's been up 99.9% of the times.
We have not had to deal with this yet. My client has bought the smallest option, i.e., 1TB. We understand that this is scalable but my first client is unlikely to need anything more than this.
I would rate the technical support a 7/10.
Previously, we haven't used any other solution. This is a net new solution for my client. They were managing all BI on-premises but with our move to an enterprise data warehouse build, cloud was chosen due to ease of management and no additional headcount required to manage the platform or infrastructure.
The setup was very easy, once the licensing issues were cleared up. It took one initial technical support call to get all the needed information. The rest of the tools and documentation are all on a single site co-resident with the basic SQL browser and database management console.
I was not involved in the licensing but I'd advise doing your best comparison with similar platforms. If you are looking to go 100% IBM (IBM Cognos and other IBM tools as well as cloud database and analytics), it should be easier from the support and contractual standpoint.
We did not evaluate other cloud options. We just looked at other on-premises databases like Microsoft SQL Server and the Oracle solution.
Take advantage of the 30 day trial and do a PoC with your real use cases.
Benchmark performance for loads but keep in mind that fast reads are what this platform excels at. There are also extensions and built-in statistical tools like the R that you may want to experiment with.
IBM dashDB’s availability on the cloud and integration with IBM Bluemix gives universal access to our teams that are spread over different geolocations. It’s a high-performance columnar database and stores data at 10x compression in comparison to traditional RDMBS systems.
For us, we have large volumes of data to store and analyze, i.e., around 2-10 GB daily data in flat file formats and with high compression ratio; thus we save a lot of space on the cloud.
IBM dashDB comes with some unique features like integrated RStudio, a full scale database management studio (IBM Data Studio) and web-based management console that makes using this product easy.
It also offers SMP as well as MPP instances where MPP is a 3-or-more node cluster for big data storage and analysis.
Our analytics teams really like the integrated RStudio feature with which they can instantly connect to structured data and do their analysis. Traditionally, our analytics team would ask for data in flat files. They had to write the codes in order to clean and import the files and only then could they start the analysis part.
Now, the ETL team takes care of importing the data to dashDB and our data science team can focus on building the models. Once the model is developed, our modeling team can save the results in dashDB, which can be instantly used by our presentation apps. This is much easier and faster to work with instead of using the CSV files in all steps of data sharing.
One of the biggest advantage of cloud computing is Auto-scaling. AWS Redshift allows you to add more storage and CPUs/instances without any significant downtime.
With dashDB, scalability and uptime need more improvement. dashDB is not auto-scalable as of now. For any addition of space or computing power, we have to raise a request and there is a downtime to upgrade the instance.
The pay-as-you-go model is missing. You must buy a minimum instance of CPU and storage to begin with.
I have used this solution for more than two years.
Deployment was smooth and easy. IBM's enterprise support is excellent in taking down the requirements, suggesting the right solution and planning the deployment as per your needs.
After our initial setup of single instance of dashDB with basic storage and computing, we moved to higher storage and also created multiple environments for Dev and Production. In each case, the planning, execution and support on dashDB services was very good.
In the first year, we had multiple issues with stability of the service. We started with a cloud-based shared instance with limited data space. Once our PoC was done, we moved to a dedicated instance with high availability and better SLAs.
We did encounter issues with scalability. Even with a MPP instance, scalability is not transparent.
To add a node, we need to raise a request and there is downtime associated with it.
For a dedicated instance, the technical support is extremely good. There’s a dedicated team to address any of the reported issues and usually the response time is under few minutes.
We had data in MySQL and Oracle on AWS. We switched as we were looking for a long-term solution and also for data privacy issues.
Most of our clients have concerns for data privacy in the cloud. With dashDB dedicated instances in IBM SoftLayer infra, we can assure our clients of physical separation of their data.
Dedicated instances also offer dashDB in bare-metal servers. This gives us much higher performance in data computation and at a lower cost in comparison to virtual CPUs.
It was very straightforward. You need to create a free account on Bluemix and start exploring dashDB along with the other services. Once we finalized dashDB, IBM took only two or three days to setup our dedicated instance.
If you know your data is large to begin with and will grow quickly, dashDB pricing is in comparison to the other service providers in the market.
We evaluated a couple of other options. NoSQL databases and free databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. However, NoSQL did not work at all for us.
Our data was structured and relational; we needed something with the traditional cursor kind of behavior for our apps.
If your need is for an integrated development environment such as RStudio, Spark, app development and other services as offered on Bluemix, then you can plan your data scalability well in advance.
dashDB is a good product to work with. The extra cost you spend on performance, technical support and tools to work with is worth it.
I like that the dashDB solution is built on DB2 technology. This means that you can use all the features of a DB2 database, but outsource all the hardware and software maintenance. Cloud solutions/services are the big thing for the future. IBM has provided users with the ability to store data in the cloud with the option to use the database as a MPP server.
The organization (a customer of ours) has used it to create a sort of data hub to use as a foundation for other business applications, such as self-service BI and online web services.
I would like to see improvements in backup and authentication.
It needs the ability to increase the number of retained backups to more than 2 days. This is a limitation. Also, the ability to connect an AD namespace to the login of dashDB is a missing feature.
I’ve used dashDB for approximately 8 months.
At the start of the project, the customer had difficulty with connecting to the dashDB instance. After IBM recreated the dashDB instance, it worked fine.
We did not encounter any scalability issues during the project.
I rate technical support a 3.5/5 or average.
Implementing dashDB was a requirement from the customer.
IBM did the initial setup, so we weren't involved in this process.
We evaluated Microsoft and Amazon cloud services.
Look closely at the limitations of the product (cloud is never the same as on-premise solutions) and align them with the requirements of the project. If this is acceptable, then switch.
