Informatica Data Archive vs Quest Foglight for Databases comparison

Informatica and Quest Software are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. Informatica is ranked #22, while Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. Informatica holds a 2.3% mindshare in DDM, compared to Quest Software’s 8.0% mindshare. Additionally, 66% of Informatica users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

Informatica Data Archive

Read 2 Informatica Data Archive reviews

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157 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

Quest Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Quest Foglight for Databases reviews

1,947 Views
722 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Informatica Data Archive

Quest Foglight for Databases

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

Informatica Data Archive and Quest Foglight for Databases are products competing in data management and monitoring. Quest Foglight for Databases seems to have the upper hand with its robust feature set, offering significant insights into database performance.

Features: Informatica Data Archive provides data archiving, compliance capabilities, and storage optimization. Quest Foglight for Databases offers comprehensive monitoring, performance optimization features, and detailed insights into database health and performance.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Informatica Data Archive is known for straightforward deployment and responsive service, allowing easy integration. Quest Foglight for Databases has a more complex deployment but offers comprehensive support options for extensive assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Informatica Data Archive has a lower setup cost with quick ROI via efficient data storage solutions. Quest Foglight for Databases, though higher in setup cost, delivers significant long-term ROI with advanced monitoring capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Informatica Data Archive vs. Quest Foglight for Databases Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Informatica Data Archive vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

June 2025

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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

Informatica Data Archive

Ranking in Database Development and Management

22nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Quest Foglight for Databases

Ranking in Database Development and Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of Informatica Data Archive is 2.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Foglight for Databases is 8.0%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

Santanu Bhattacharya

Service at Cognizant

Easy to understand layer flows, reliable, and excellent support

We are using Informatica Data Archive for clients' legacy systems to confirm the data from their legacy system to the new system based on the SQL Server The most valuable features of Informatica Data Archive are ease of use, and the flows from one layer to the next are simple to understand. The…

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Stuart Dairiki

Senior IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Empowers efficient database monitoring and performance troubleshooting with powerful workload analysis

I find it extremely helpful to use Foglight to triage any database issues, specifically performance issues using what Foglight calls PI investigator. It is a very powerful workload analysis tool that helps me understand where bottlenecks are. It allows me to see performance issues as end users report them. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it. Foglight provides us with a near-real-time activity database. It's not 100% real-time. It has less than a minute latency. It allows us to see performance issues as end-users report them. We started seeing benefits pretty much immediately. We use Foglight to display intensive databases. However, it's not something we monitor regularly. It's only something we kind of dig into as we troubleshoot and triage issues. It does help us determine potential IT help issues. When we use Foglight, we find it helps drill down holistically into potential bottlenecks. It helps us to see what is going on in the database. Foglight allows us to monitor multiple database platforms. We use, for example, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Amazon Redshift, and SAP HANA. It gives us insight into our entire landscape of production workloads in near real-time. The solution saves costs when performing root cause analysis. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It allows us to obtain information quicker and easier than by manually compiling information.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the most valuable features of Informatica Data Archive is its performance."

"The most valuable features of Informatica Data Archive are ease of use, and the flows from one layer to the next are simple to understand."

"The platform is very stable."

"The PI module allows [my colleague] to identify which new indexes or modified indexes are going to make the biggest impact."

"Foglight's Change Tracking capabilities are another huge feature. It is wonderful to be able to do that. People don't realize the amount of information that Foglight gathers from a given server or instance. It gets down to the version of SQL, the disk array, everything that's there. Any change that's made, any upgrade to SQL, shows up on the dashboard almost immediately. You don't know how much time you save just having a tool in your back pocket that does that for you."

"What I really like is the SQL PI feature, which allows us to drill down into queries and identify what is causing contention in the database. Using the SQL PI feature, I am able to drill down into the queries, see what is blocking, and try to improve it."

"One of the hardest things to do in database management is to evaluate performance deviation across time. The adaptive baseline that Quest is using is by far the most helpful. That doesn't necessarily mean I use it on a daily basis, but it is something that I have not been able to find in any other tool, at the same level."

"The profiler allows us to look at the profiles of the database queries that are being run over time. It allows us to go back to our customers and say that these are some of the queries causing them some headaches. It gives us the opportunity to provide suggestions on how to improve their experience."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

"The alarms alert proactively if there are any potential or ongoing issues with the databases that we support. That means we can take preventive or corrective action before the issue becomes a big issue. And the SQL PI features enable us to drill down into performance issues in our databases so that we can improve performance, which is important."

More Quest Foglight for Databases pros

Cons

"Informatica Data Archive could improve by providing training. Training is one area where we lack, there are not very many trained resources in the market for sales, GPM, proposals, new offerings, or new features that are being added to this solution. It would be really helpful for consultants, like me, to understand the new, cool features these solutions are constantly adding. Training is something, that should be in place."

"The recovery features could improve in Informatica Data Archive."

"I get a lot of alerts that, while important, are not critical. Then I have to dig in and figure out how to turn alerts off, but not the logging. I want to be able to go back, once we get the other big issues out of the way, and start fine-tuning some of those other areas, but I don't necessarily want to receive an email for all of them."

"One thing that I would like, and it's probably something that I could set up internally, is something other than a dashboard which I have to look at to know that a server is down. I'd like bells and whistles to go off... If I look at the dashboard I know there's a server down. But if I'm not looking at it, if I'm looking at some other problem, I want to know about it. You can do that, you can use SMSs and alerts to your phone, and I could set it up to handle that, but it would be nice if, out-of-the-box, Foglight did that."

"The data model needs improvement when it comes to creating custom reports. That is an area where it needs a bit of improvement. Foglight gathers a lot of information around our databases as part of its monitoring. While I know all this information is in there, trying to pull the metric we want out for custom reports is sometimes hard to find. One nice thing about Foglight is that you can create custom dashboards, which you can easily convert to reports. We would be doing a lot more of that if it weren't for the challenging data model."

"When holding data for two years for 20 SQL Servers, the reporting becomes sluggish and unresponsive."

"The monitoring capabilities for Postgres should be at par with SQL Server. This is the area where we push back on our Quest representative. We want more insights into Postgres."

"I would like the rule development code to be made available so we don't always have to be referred to professional services for custom solutions. For example, if we want to exclude certain databases from a particular rule, we shouldn't have to go to support and to professional services for that solution. If the code and syntax were available, we have resources that could quickly turn something like that around."

"Foglight does have a component that allows you to look at things in real time, but it's not as friendly or as efficient in terms of responsiveness as Quest Spotlight is. Foglight might be lacking in this department."

"When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating... They still won't use it because they feel it's too intimidating. They will open something up and not know what to do. It's not very user-friendly. You have to click on a lot of stuff to find the information."

More Quest Foglight for Databases cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Informatica Data Archive is reasonable. Different versions of the solution are available, such as the professional edition and enterprise edition."

"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."

"Pricing is very reasonable. We were able to construct a pretty easy contract with Quest, who were very easy to work with and very amenable to what we are trying to do. It worked out well for us."

"This is like the "Cadillac" of performance monitoring software. It's not cheap... I am currently with a company that I was able to convince that the product is worth the cost."

"The price is worth it, if you have the time to go through the information."

"It is cost-effective. With our EA, it is really based on the scale of our database environment. We found the Quest team to be reasonable and flexible when it comes to pricing and scaling of licenses."

"The price of Foglight could be a little more competitive in Chile, and it should be lowered for long-time customers— at least by 20 percent. Sometimes the price is a limitation. We have seven instances and nearly 5 million users. If Quest Foglight could reduce its prices for the clients that have been with it for a long time, we would be able to have more instances."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

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Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Foglight for Databases?

The pricing is palatable. We've already done one renewal and we are in our second contract. We're happy thus far.

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What needs improvement with Quest Foglight for Databases?

It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms. I've been talking to their product development team about enhancements that I wo...

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What is your primary use case for Quest Foglight for Databases?

I primarily use the solution for database monitoring, specifically for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, SAP HANA, and AWS Redshift.

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Database Development and Management

May 2025

Download Informatica Data Archive product report

Buyer's Guide

Quest Foglight for Databases

May 2025

Download Quest Foglight for Databases product report

Also Known As

Data Archive

No data available

Overview

Retire legacy applications, manage data growth, improve application performance, and maintain compliance with structured archiving.

Informatica

Foglight identifies and resolves performance issues across your applications, databases and virtual environments. The Foglight family of products easily integrates with your existing tools, so you can monitor and analyze data from almost any source across your infrastructure and view it through a single interface with our customizable, unified monitoring platform

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Clopay

CommitDBA

Buyer's Guide

Informatica Data Archive vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

June 2025

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