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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 June 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of IBM Netezza Performance Server is 6.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.1%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Spark SQL5.1%
IBM Netezza Performance Server6.1%
Other88.8%
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

"Bottom line, Netezza costs less to own and operate, and is easier to manage."
"Netezza can process all this amount of data and give a result in less than 40 seconds."
"We now have a single store of critical business metrics in the investment bank."
"For every organization that I have been in that has Netezza, the ability to load and run queries is greatly simplified and A LOT faster than any other DBMS out there."
"The performance is most important to me, and it helps our ability to make business decisions quickly."
"Our BI enviroment with Netezza, Cognos and Data Stage has been a great success"
"Distribution (no index or partition), built-in analytics is a major advantange."
"Parallel data processing is a significant feature for me."
"Certain data sets that are very large are very difficult to process with Pandas and Python libraries. Spark SQL has helped us a lot with that."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."
"Spark SQL's efficiency in managing distributed data and its simplicity in expressing complex operations make it an essential part of our data pipeline."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
 

Cons

"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."
"The initial set-up was affected by the fact that we seemed to get a junior technician from IBM who was not as good as other engineers we have had."
"Support for interfaces has been poor."
"This product is being discontinued from IBM, and I would like to have some kind of upgrade available."
"Since it is an appliance, individual components within the appliance cannot be scaled."
"Netezza does not perform well with a significant volume of individual record operations."
"I can't extend the storage, only up to 6x compress of data."
"Data lineage on column or even object level does not exist, therefore external applications have to be used"
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly. I probably need more information or knowledge. In other database solutions, you can easily optimize all partitions. I haven't found a quicker way to do that in Spark SQL. It would be good if you don't need a partition here, and the system automatically partitions in the best way. They can also provide more educational resources for new users."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"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."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"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 solution is open-sourced and free."
"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."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
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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
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
University
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise6
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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.