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IBM Netezza Performance Server vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Netezza Performance Server
Ranking in Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
98
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2024, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of IBM Netezza Performance Server is 3.9%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.8%, down from 19.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Shemal Gandhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 16, 2023
A cost-effective data warehousing tool, but security features like TDE encryption are missing
IBM Netezza Performance Server is a basic data warehousing tool we use for internal reporting IBM Netezza Performance Server is a cost-effective solution. Oracle Exadata's security features, like TDE encryption, are missing in IBM Netezza Performance Server. I have been working with IBM Netezza…
VivekSingh 1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 11, 2024
Provides good data ingestion capability, but should include more AI capabilities
The solution's integration aspect is good, and all the connectors are in place. I found Snowflake similar to RDS. We use it for both data in motion and data in transit. It looks like the tool handles the data quite securely. We create ETL patterns. We ingest data from different source systems, and we have to create data pipelines. It would be useful if we could have AI features added to identify what I'm going to do with this data. It would be good if it could look at the data and help me create an automated pipeline instead of me creating a pipeline by myself. I'm from a retail background. I completed my Oracle DBA training a long time ago, about 18 years ago. I was quite familiar with the Snowflake and relational database concepts since I had already completed the Oracle ops, DBA ops, OCP, and OPA courses. For me, it was a journey similar to when I shifted from Oracle RDS to Snowflake. Although I was quite familiar with most of the concepts, there were some learnings. Whosoever is in the data field should at least try Snowflake once. They will then realize the best features in the solution and can continue using it. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of the IBM Netezza Performance Server are the NPS server because of the reduced maintenance and overall good performance."
"The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format."
"The benefit is really because of the additional speed that we have and, truth be told, the more updated ETL processes and the revamped scheduler in general."
"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. It is faster, when you compare it to any other product."
"The performance is most important to me, and it helps our ability to make business decisions quickly."
"The data governance prospect... from what I've seen, that is a really powerful tool as well, to help with data lineage and keeping track of that."
"We are able to execute very complex queries. Over 90 percent of our query executions are one second or less. We do millions of queries everyday."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server is a cost-effective solution."
"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"The pricing is reasonable and matches the rest of the market."
"Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance."
"It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."
"Very easy to use and easy to query."
"It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."
 

Cons

"Oracle Exadata's security features, like TDE encryption, are missing in IBM Netezza Performance Server."
"The scalability is not as expected. The capacity in the black box is not enough."
"Concurrency limit needs to be increased somewhat."
"The only issue is that it's not expandable."
"In terms of features that I would like to see, one is the ability to actually scale out an architecture. Right now, if you buy one, it's fixed. There is no scale-up availability at all."
"We are not able to scale. The only way to scale is to get another appliance, but we have a customers who would need us to hydrate the data between the two appliances, and Netezza does not do that."
"Our main problem with it is concurrency. When there are too many users running Netezza at the same time, this is when we have the most complaints."
"LIke Teradata, we can’t add a node/SPU to the existing appliance."
"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."
"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."
"There are a lot of features that they need to come up with. A lot of functions are missing in Snowflake, so we have to find a workaround for those. For example, OUTER APPLY is a basic function in SQL Server, but it is not there in Snowflake. So, you have to write complex code for it."
"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."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
"It needs a bit more rigor and governance, which is something you don't get with newer tools. This makes it less enterprise scalable. Its governance and structure can be enhanced, which would really be valuable. I would like to see some kind of prebuilt functionality in terms of having almost like a pre-built data warehouse. A functionality for generating automated kind of pieces would be good."
"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."
"The solution could improve by allowing non-structured data, such as PDFs, images, or videos. We cannot see the data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums."
"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."
"Snowflake has consumption-based costs; users only pay for storage and computing."
"It is not cheap."
"Snowflake is expensive, but when I consider what we get for that price, it's fair. I rate the solution three out of five for affordability, right in the middle."
"The solution is costly, making it unsuitable for midsize organizations due to its price."
"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."
"The price of Snowflake is very reasonable."
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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
Educational Organization
72%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Insurance Company
3%
Educational Organization
34%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Netezza Performance Server?
IBM Netezza Performance Server is a cost-effective solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support.
What needs improvement with IBM Netezza Performance Server?
Oracle Exadata's security features, like TDE encryption, are missing in IBM Netezza Performance Server.
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?
The pricing part is based on the computing and storage. The costs are different and then there are services costs as well. I have heard that Snowflake is costlier than Redshift or GCP BigQuery. A s...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
I think people do not want to create pipelines for many customers now. Normally, we have this layer architecture, like layer one, layer two, layer three, or layer four, where we have raw data, inte...
 

Also Known As

Netezza Performance Server, Netezza
Snowflake Computing
 

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
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Netezza Performance Server vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
813,418 professionals have used our research since 2012.