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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

"It stands out in efficiently handling internal actions without the need for manual intervention in tasks like building cubes and defining final dimensions."
"I like that we can synch and run a large query. I also like that we can work with a large amount of data. You don't need to work separately, as it's a ready-made solution. It also comes with a built-in machine-learning feature. Once we start inputting the data, it will suggest some things related to the data, and we can come up with nice dashboards and statistics from a vast amount of data."
"The most valuable features of this solution, in my opinion, are speed and performance, as well as cost-effectiveness."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The feature called calibrating the capacity is valuable."
"The main thing I like about BigQuery is storage. We did an on-premise BigQuery migration with trillions of records. Usually, we have to deal with insufficient storage on-premises, but in BigQuery, we don't get that because it's like cloud storage, and we can have any number of records. That is one advantage. The next major advantage is the column length. We have some limits on column length on-premises, like 10,000, and we have to design it based on that. However, with BigQuery, we don't need to design the column length at all. It will expand or shrink based on the records it's getting. I can give you a real-life example based on our migration from on-premises to GCP. There was a dimension table with a general number of records, and when we queried that on-premises, like in Apache Spark or Teradata, it took around half an hour to get those records. In BigQuery, it was instant. As it's very fast, you can get it in two or three minutes. That was very helpful for our engineers. Usually, we have to run a query on-premises and go for a break while waiting for that query to give us the results. It's not the case with BigQuery because it instantly provides results when we run it. So, that makes the work fast, it helps a lot, and it helps save a lot of time. It also has a reasonable performance rate and smart tuning. Suppose we need to perform some joins, BigQuery has a smart tuning option, and it'll tune itself and tell us the best way a query can be done in the backend. To be frank, the performance, reliability, and everything else have improved, even the downtime. Usually, on-premise servers have some downtime, but as BigQuery is multiregional, we have storage in three different locations. So, downtime is also not getting impacted. For example, if the Atlantic ocean location has some downtime, or the server is down, we can use data that is stored in Africa or somewhere else. We have three or four storage locations, and that's the main advantage."
"The initial setup process is easy."
"BigQuery is a very nice product; it is a good product, scalable, and has high performance."
"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."
"If you have good people designing how the data is stored, it's a marvelous tool."
"The solution is stable."
"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 analytics engine is not bad at forecasting predictions."
"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."
"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."
"The standout feature of IBM Db2 Warehouse, which is particularly valuable for large enterprises, is its ability to handle big data."
 

Cons

"When I open many of the Google Cloud products, I am in an environment that I do not feel familiar with; it is a little overwhelming."
"The price is a bit high but the technology is worth it."
"There are integration challenges, particularly with performance when exporting data to BigQuery from other tools like Qualitics."
"Sometimes, support specialists might not have enough experience or business understanding, which can be an issue."
"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."
"The process of migrating from Datastore to BigQuery should be improved."
"As a product, BigQuery still requires a lot of maturity to accommodate other use cases and to be widely acceptable across other organizations."
"The price could be better. Compared to competing solutions, BigQuery is expensive."
"IBM Db2 Warehouse needs to improve its interface."
"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."
"Responding to support tickets takes a lot of time. It can range from two to four days, even for critical issues."
"In terms of improvement, IBM Db2 Warehouse should be more scalable."
"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 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."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the technical support as a five. It is fairly bad."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its cost structure operates on a pay-as-you-go model."
"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."
"The solution is pretty affordable and quite cheap in comparison to PDP or Cloudera."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"The product’s pricing could be more flexible for end users."
"The price is a bit high but the technology is worth it."
"The pricing is good and there are no additional costs involved."
"The product operates on a pay-for-use model. Costs include storage and query execution, which can accumulate based on data volume and complexity."
"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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