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IBM Db2 Warehouse vs Snowflake vs Teradata 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of IBM Db2 Warehouse is 2.6%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 12.5%, down from 18.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Teradata is 13.2%, down from 16.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake12.5%
Teradata13.2%
IBM Db2 Warehouse2.6%
Other71.7%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Sherpard  Muzuva - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.
RajeshKumar25 - PeerSpot reviewer
Harnessing advanced parallelism for top performance while embracing cloud trends
Teradata is primarily used for data warehousing across all customers. My clients have built-in applications that use Teradata, and their use varies from customer to customer, depending on the industry and database size. The primary function is as an OLAP analytical ecosystem Scalability is…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM Db2 Warehouse is more resilient when dealing with business intelligence applications."
"The solution is stable."
"Some of the best features are stored procedures, parallelism, and different indexing strategies."
"The analytics engine is not bad at forecasting predictions."
"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."
"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."
"It can scale effectively as long as resources are available."
"IBM Db2 Warehouse is more resilient when dealing with business intelligence applications."
"The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available."
"The most valuable feature of Teradata is security. It runs on Unix and Linux platforms which provide better security."
"It is quick, secure, and has less hassles because we don't have to involve our networking team, infrastructure, etc. It is very easy to deploy and make market ready."
"I found all parts --loading, transformation, processing & querying work in parallel, and end-to-end-- to be valuable."
"​Building a data warehouse with Teradata has definitely helped a lot of our downstream applications to more easily access information."
"It's stable and reliable."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the warehousing model."
"The functionality of the solution is excellent."
"I've never had any issues with scalability."
 

Cons

"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."
"In terms of improvement, IBM Db2 Warehouse should be more scalable."
"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."
"It takes a long time to have a new version or release, similar to Oracle."
"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."
"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."
"Lacks sufficient documentation and particularly in Spanish."
"The product is not very cheap, and a reduction in costs would be appreciated."
"From an improvement perspective, Snowflake can evolve in terms of writing costly, expensive queries with less cost and try to see if pipeline development can be made a little easier."
"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."
"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."
"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."
"The billing doubles with size increase, but processing does not necessarily speed up accordingly."
"Snowflake needs transparency over costs and pricing."
"The cost efficiency and monitoring of this solution could be improved. It's easy to spend a lot on Snowflake and it does offer monitoring tools but they're pretty basic."
"The solution’s pricing, scalability, and technical support response time could be improved."
"Stability-wise, we have had some issues with automation and the ability to handle large datasets."
"The capability to implement it with comparable performance across various private cloud environments, ensuring adaptability to different infrastructure setups would be beneficial."
"The tool's flexibility and capacity for expansion are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"The reporting side wasn't very good in the past, but with the latest versions, it's getting better. Still, the friendliness of the PDC reporting and functionality needs to be improved."
"It's primarily designed for big projects and therefore, the pricing is pretty high. It's not suitable for smaller companies."
"When backups are performed, it locks the database, preventing user access, which is a concern."
"It is hard for some of our users to set up rules for cleansing and transforming data, so this is something that could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In a traditional on-prem database, in a data warehouse, the solution is probably on the expensive side."
"I have not been billed yet, but it should be less. I'm still running the trial version, but it seems to be less than Databricks."
"Snowflake has consumption-based costs; users only pay for storage and computing."
"There is a license needed to use this solution. There are a few licensing options available. They have a pay-as-you-go option, but it is recommended to pay upfront."
"It's expensive."
"Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake."
"Snowflake is cost-effective. However, the cost can depend on how it's being used and how efficiently the code is written. If engineers don't write efficient code and usage is billed based on processing, it can become costly. If they write optimal code and choose the best solution, it can reduce costs in comparison to other options, such as Oracle."
"Pricing is based on usage. It is the most expensive of our data tools."
"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."
"The price of Teradata is on the higher side, and I think that it where they lose out on some of their business."
"The price of Teradata could be less expensive."
"The product cost is high for what the client gets. There may be more cost-effective solutions for small and medium-sized organizations."
"​I would advise others to look into migration and setup as a fixed price and incorporate a SaaS option for other Teradata services​."
"Teradata is currently making improvements in this area."
"In the past, it turned out that other solutions, in order to provide the full range of abilities that the Teradata platform provides plus the migration costs, would end up costing more than Teradata does."
"The tool costs about 30,000 euros a month, while Azure Synapse SQL only costs 10,000."
"The cost is significantly high."
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Comparison Review

it_user232068 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
27%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise49
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Db2 Warehouse?
The standout feature of IBM Db2 Warehouse, which is particularly valuable for large enterprises, is its ability to ha...
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, ther...
What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databric...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is stil...
Comparing Teradata and Oracle Database, which product do you think is better and why?
I have spoken to my colleagues about this comparison and in our collective opinion, the reason why some people may d...
Which companies use Teradata and who is it most suitable for?
Before my organization implemented this solution, we researched which big brands were using Teradata, so we knew if ...
Is Teradata a difficult solution to work with?
Teradata is not a difficult product to work with, especially since they offer you technical support at all levels if ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

InfoSphere Warehouse, IBM InfoSphere Warehouse
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
IntelliFlex, Aster Data Map Reduce, , QueryGrid, Customer Interaction Manager, Digital Marketing Center, Data Mover, Data Stream Architecture
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Alameda County Social Services Agency, Sui Southern Gas Company Limited
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: August 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.