IBM Db2 Database Reviews

I use IBM Db2 Database for an application that we use in the marketing sector.

I was a consultant.

When we use IBM Db2 Database, we are using a simple SQL server. I didn't use all of the features. It's mainly because when I worked, they used to set up Db2 for DB.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is its stability. We have never had any problems and have never had to contact technical support.

The scalability could be improved, but the problem was that it was something in the legacy of the application where I work.

The problem was not the DB itself, but there were certain limits regarding the application, and the DB was the final component, where we worked. We weren't too concerned with the DB.

It's expensive, but it's not for every client. 

Also, the website could be more intuitive. I didn't find it easy to find documentation on the website.

I have been working with IBM Db2 Database for one year.

IBM Db2 Database was stable, we didn't have any issues.

IBM Db2 Database is not scalable.

We have approximately 8, 000 clients.

We didn't have any issues with IBM Db2 Database. It was stable for us. We did not have the need to contact technical support.

I have some experience with Terraform, from HashiCorp. 

It's a tool for infrastructure, for building automation similar to Jenkins, or Bamboo.

I worked with Bamboo a year ago.

I have worked with databases such as MySQL, IBM Db2, Oracle DB, and some NoSQL databases like MongoDB. We use the threat procedures when we used Oracle DB.

When I worked within Db2, I didn't set up the Db2. I just used it. I didn't do any tuning or anything like that. I only performed some database management.

Clients are required to purchase a license.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate IBM Db2 Database a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the platform to store query data. I work in a bank, where we store customer information on it.

The product has improved our organization by performing well for data storage and queries. It helps us retrieve information quickly.

The solution's querying feature is most valuable. It allows me to retrieve data quickly.

The solution's data retrieval speed could be improved, especially for heavy queries. Better optimization or indexing might also be involved.

I have been working with IBM Db2 for about two years.

The product is mostly stable, even in a large organization like ours. 

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

We manage around 15,000 to 20,000 platform users. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

I do not interact directly with the technical support team. 

Our internal support team handles any issues and communicates with the provider.

The solution has been good with strong performance, contributing to our organization's efficiency.

We use the product combined with other solutions, such as SAP Crystal Reports and various reporting tools, but we do not directly integrate it with databases like SQL Server.

I rate it as ten because, despite occasional issues, it performs very well overall.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its compatibility with IBM Power Systems.

IBM Db2 Database is not a commodity product compatible with hyperscalers. IBM Db2 Database needs to work more on compatibility with other platforms.

Considering the competitors of IBM Db2 Database, I would say that the tool has to be made more cloud-friendly and should have agreements with AWS, Microsoft, or Google to run things on hyperscalers. In general, I would want the tool to have a bit more openings around cloud solutions rather than only being available on-premises.

I have been using IBM Db2 Database for a few years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

It doesn't really matter whether small companies or big companies use IBM Db2 Database. Whether to choose IBM Db2 Database or not depends on a customer's preferences.

If I consider the price of IBM Db2 Database, I would say there are cheaper products in the market.

Whether or not there is a requirement to pay additionally for maintenance or support apart from the standard licensing fees of the solution depends on the agreement you have with IBM.

When you look at IBM Db2 Database, you feel it is more of a vendor lock-in type of approach. IBM Db2 Database offers little performance difference or competitive advantage compared to Oracle SQL or other platforms.

The products recommended to my customers may vary and depend on certain agreements. There are a lot of products, like Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and many other cloud databases, making for a wide portfolio of products.

IBM Db2 Database is a very standard and IBM-centric solution, so you need to be familiar with all the aspects of the product since it is not really an open product, meaning you can't run it on everything. IBM Db2 Database only runs on specific systems. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for handling retail customer information. We use it as an integration broker. It stores all the vendor information.

We rely on it for our data transfers. If we need to send an invoice, for example, we'd use this product. 

The solution is very stable and reliable. It's a very mature product.

If you have specialized support, it's fine in terms of getting assistance.

The solution can scale. 

IBM gives us tools that help us 

When I look at Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server provides me with better tools for database management. IBM is missing things like data permissions and backups, et cetera. Microsoft has a very user-friendly interface that IBM lacks. The user interface from IBM is not great.

I've used the solution on and off for the past ten years. 

It's a stable solution. It's been around for quite some time and is very mature. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's quite scalable. We haven't had any issues. We can reuse DB2 mainframes, et cetera. We haven't had issues. 

We're not increasing usage. We're pushing towards the cloud and Azure systems. 

We are a big customer of IBM and have some sort of specialized services. We have an elevated support agreement that helps. In general, it's not the greatest. That's only at a personal level.

Neutral

I am familiar with the Microsoft SQL Server, which is more user-friendly and has more user-friendly features. We're also exploring moving away from this solution to more cloud-based Azure services. 

The setup wasn't part of my job. We had a team that handled it. However, my understanding is it was straightforward. 

I don't deal with the pricing. I can't speak to its exact cost.

I'm not a database person. I'm a programmer. 

I'm using version nine in the company.

If a person wants to use the solution from a user perspective, I'd suggest they actually look at cloud programs, not IBM or on-premises. Cloud simplifies a lot of things. If I were starting from scratch, I'd go right to the could.

The reliability is excellent, and therefore I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I only have issues with the user interface.

We work with a few use cases suggested by the IBM Watson Library. All the data is inside the event processor, we can extract it with a query. There are multiple use cases already in the IBM marketplace.

It's easy to search and extract data from the warehouse using queries.

The queries can be difficult for beginners because there are so many. I would like to see more use cases for flow analysis that enable us to correlate the flow with events. Adding this feature in a QI format would be good for beginners.

I have used Db2 for around two years.

I rate Db2 eight out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Db2 nine out of 10 for scalability. We have more than a thousand users. 

IBM's technical support is excellent. They provide a solution in 24 to 48 hours. 

Setting up Db2 is straightforward. Most IBM products I've used aren't complex to integrate or deploy. We deploy it on-premise and in the cloud.

I rate IBM Db2 two out of 10 for affordability. It's expensive but not much more than other tools. There are also cloud-based solutions like Elasticsearch. 

There are multiple competitors like Oracle, but Db2 is the best for our use case.

I rate IBM Db2 nine out of 10. It's more expensive, but it's better than the competing solutions. I have to deduct a point for license costs. Everything else is excellent. We recommend Db2 to many clients, but few adopt it due to the high price tag. If a project has strict budgetary restraints, we typically don't recommend Db2. 

I am currently using IBM Db2 for z/OS. It is used to manage a huge amount of structured business data and provides DB services for many different applications.

Its performance is great. In my case, half a million transactions per second are using the DB services of the Db2 mainframe. So, it provides a great ability to support logical units of work.

For every big organization or big site, such as a bank or a credit card company, the most important asset is data. An organization puts all its business data and manages it in Db2 because it trusts that Db2 will be able to provide all the necessary services, such as:

• Business continuation
• The ability to process a large amount of data
• The ability to maintain a large amount of data
• The ability to execute DB services in a fraction of a second

Its functionality and availability are valuable. Its availability is great. It is available 99.99% of the time. 

Its security is great, and there is also the ability to execute very complex SQL statements. It provides the developers the ability to get the functionality using great tools like SQL and many other additional features.

The management of Db2 should be simplified because there are not too many specialists in this area, and the learning curve of Db2 specialists is very long. After the courses, probably it takes one and a half or two years to get to the point when you are using the product properly in the production systems. So, the complexity is very high, and the most important thing is to simplify the management of the product, including self-maintenance. They should simplify the installation, management, and monitoring to simplify the product. It takes too long for a person to be a specialist in this product.

The price should also be adjusted a little bit. IBM is quite expensive with respect to the product.

I have been working with this solution for 34 years.

It is very stable.

It is absolutely scalable. It is hard to count the number of users. For example, in a bank, each and every customer of the bank uses the product. There are hundreds of thousands or, in my case, even millions of customers. There are also people who are not customers but access the website of the banks to look at something. Those people are not registered, but they're using the product as well. So, there could be millions of users. In the banks where I work, the business is growing. With the growth of the business, the number of users is also growing every year by a small percentage.

If Db2 is properly used, an organization can build a database with thousands of tables, and it can provide the exact information for the applications within a second. We have 500,000 transactions a second, and each of them needs to get some information from the database to perform a show, insert, or delete operation for different users. In the banking or finance domain, there are a large number of transactions. Even in a small country, there would be a large number of transactions every minute or seconds of the day. Db2 is capable of providing services for each and every transaction.

Currently, technical support is concentrated in IBM's main supporting facilities and laboratories. Years ago, each and every country had its own engineers who provided technical support, but today, it is concentrated in a few hands through the support centers of IBM, and their support is good.

Positive

Before Db2, we used IMS. It was years ago, and currently, in addition to Db2, the same organization is using Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, and even NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB. During the past five years or so, the NoSQL databases are getting in as well. So, we are using a few RDBMSs and NoSQL databases as well in parallel.

When I compare IBM's mainframe Db2 for z/OS with other relational database management systems, this one wins against almost each and every other database in terms of abilities and performance. Optimizing the scales or optimizer for creating the access process is probably the best in the world. In many aspects, Db2 wins against almost each and every other RDBMS, including Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, and NoSQL ones. However, in the area of complexity and maintenance, probably the others are better.

It is quite complex. It is not a simple installation. If the installation is done by a specialist, it takes a few hours.

It was implemented by our own in-house team. For deployment and maintenance, in a big organization, probably two DBAs are required to be on the safe side, in case one of them is on holiday or something like that. Two people are sufficient to maintain the product.

It is expensive. The price depends on the size of the machine on which you are installing the Db2 and the features you are using. It also depends on the country. IBM has different policies and different options for payment for this product. 

IBM Db2 manages a huge amount of structured business data and provides DB services for many different applications in banking, military, logistics, and other areas. Big organizations that are using IBM mainframe are using Db2 Database for providing the database services for various applications. Thousands of organizations in the world are using Db2 for managing their data—their most important asset. By using Db2, they can manage this huge amount of data by building an enterprise-wide data model, consisting of thousands of entities and tables. When built with a proper methodology, Db2 is a great asset for each and every organization.

IBM mainframe Db2 for z/OS would probably be the best platform if you need a database that is not limited to one specific area and can provide you with the following:

• Different DB services
• Different functional and application areas
• Parallel processing abilities with a big amount of relational structured data

It will be difficult to find a better solution for such a business.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is very good.

We primarily use the solution as the main data store warehouse for the corporation.

It's great as a backend database system utilized to store the data for the entire corporate structure.

Due to the fact that we're going to go with the hardware-specifics of the fact that it's bundled in IBM i, it's exceedingly reliable, as the architecture of the IBM i just does not go down.

It runs very well. It runs very solid. It does everything that I expect it to do. It offers all of the standard RDBMS functionalities and capabilities. I consider Db2 to be a direct competitor with Oracle and SQL servers any day of the week. The difference is what flavor of Db2 you're going to run. You're going to run the Linux Unix, are going to run the IBM i version, and then it comes down to, for me, the IBM i, due to the fact that the architecture does not fail. It does not go down. It does not get hacked. There's never been a successful hacking of an IBM i architecture. You're looking at an environment where your data is extremely secure, compared to a lot of the other RDBMS systems.

The solution is configurable and has what you would consider to be a desktop management configuration capability too. You can partition it off, and you can set up different instances of it and such. The interface is more than adequate. There's nothing great about it, there's nothing poor about it. It's more than capable of doing what you need to do if you do need to do DBA maintenance kind of work to it.

It's going to be a much smaller marketplace for this product, and most significantly, IBM doesn't target marketing to that marketplace. Their view of it is they're maintaining it, they're continuing to upgrade it, they're continuing to grow it, however, they don't go out and try and sell that as an architectural solution the way they do Linux and Unix. That's because once you get inside of the IBM architecture, up until about six or eight years ago, it was not open source. You were tied to the development language of either COBOL or the development language of RPG if you wanted to develop on that platform.

Now, it now supports Java and PHP, and it does open source, but for those reasons, IBM was never looking to market or push that as a viable solution. They didn't push the IBM i as a direct competitor to Oracle, they pushed their Linux Unix versions of it, their IBM Z series against Oracle and SQL server, as it's a more direct head-to-head comparison. The IBM i architecture is the one-off if you will. You're not going to see a lot of people looking at it.

I've been using the solution for 25 years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The hardware does not fail, the software does not fail, and so the reliability is there, however, the reliability isn't necessarily Db2, it's the fact that it's the IBM i that has the reliability. Db2 is inheriting that, and again, is staying up and running because of that.

The system scales very well. It runs the new power nine chips and it's about to run the new power 10 chips that IBM is releasing as well. For that reason, the current systems out there are 16 CPU Power 10 processors that can have terabytes of memory associated with them. It performs extremely well in the environment. 

The system is very scalable to very large magnitudes. There are some very large Fortune 10 and Fortune 15 companies that run Db2 systems and can attest to the scalability

IBM's technical support is fine and their people are good. When you give them a call they get after it. We're satisfied with the level of service provided. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. Due to the fact that it's bundled inside of the system, you don't have to do any special implementation. As soon as you have the system up and running, and the operating system running, Db2 is already running. There was an instance of it running on the architecture at that moment. There's absolutely zero setup in that environment.

It's hard to separate out the exact pricing. It's bundled; you can't compare head-to-head against Oracle and SQL server at that point, as the costing is embedded inside of the purchase of the operating system software.

We're not a software provider, we're an end-user.

When you start talking about Db2 on Linux and Unix, the current version is version 17.3 or 17.4. The IBM i, the versioning doesn't work the same way, it has to do with the operating system levels that you're running, as to which version of Db2 you're in. It's integrated in with the system, operating system. It's not actually an independent version of Db2, it's integrated in with the operating system on that platform.

Db2 is different in our architectural world than standalone Db2. It's not like standing up an instance of Db2 would be the same as it would in Oracle, or a Microsoft SQL instance, on a Windows 10 server or a Windows 2008 server or whatever it may be. It's the fact that it's bundled in with the software, with the operating system, with the hardware, when you buy that machine. Since it's all bundled inside of it, we're having to go out and independently do things with it. It's inherent, it's bundled. It's probably not the best example of Db2, because even when IBM goes out and talks about Db2, they talk about Db2 zOS, which is the Linux Unix installation. You very rarely see them talking about the IBM i installations. In fact, in even the documentation I was reading in the comparisons, it was comparing the Linux Unix IBM Db2 against Oracle, and against the Microsoft SQL Server.

If you're looking at an alternative to Oracle or to Microsoft SQL server, look at Db2, and then once you're in Db2's world, take a look at IBM i against the IBM Z, and compare the two of them. The stigma that the IBM i has, is that RPG language barrier. Since that barrier has now been removed, you can do everything that you can do on the IBM Z as well. The stability of the platform is what people need to look at. There is a trade-off of uptime and never been hacked operating system against versus Microsoft and Oracle in the news every single day. Microsoft cloud just made a comment in the last 48, 72 hours about their cloud services being hacked. That's just something you do not see happening with that IBM series architecture.

Since Db2 rides inside of very secure architecture, people should probably give it a very good, hard look, compared to Oracle and Microsoft, and say, "Hey it might not be as popular. It might not be as big a deal, but if my data is more secure, and I don't have downtime and I have performance, is it something that we should be looking at?" 

I've been at companies that have looked to move off of that, and when they've looked at the Oracle solution, and, no matter how you power it, and no matter how you scale it, whether you scale it up or you scale it wide, the performance is simply just not there compared to what the IBM systems offer through their Db2, whether it be the i or the Z through what they offer internally in their performance capabilities. Your iOS, your throughputs, your performance cycles, you cannot touch it with Microsoft or with Oracle scalability-wise. That is far and away the most scalable systems and the highest performing systems of the set of them.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

Our company uses the solution as a database service for a client in the furniture manufacturing industry. 

The solution's security is very tough and impenetrable. 

Hardware and support subscriptions are very expensive. Better partnerships in the Middle East or Egypt could reduce costs. 

The solution no longer supports POWER8. 

I have been using the solution for ten years. 

The solution is very, very stable. 

The scalability is an issue for us because Database Hammer does not work with IBM Power and POWER9 is too expensive. 

Technical support is very helpful and better than competitors such as Dell, Lenovo, or HP. 

We previously used POWER5 and POWER7 so have been with the solution for some time. 

The setup is very easy and we accomplished it through self education. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

The solution's hardware and subscription model for support are very expensive in the Middle East or Egypt. 

I rate cost a three out of ten. 

Database Hammer does not work with IBM Power or POWER8. It is too expensive for us to purchase POWER9 so we are migrating to AWS and comparing that to Azure. 

Currently, our server and database are shut down and not in use. 

Stability, mobility, and security are rated a ten out of ten but the extreme cost changes my overall rating to a five out of ten.