We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The installation was straightforward. We did not have a large installation and it took a couple of weeks to complete."
"It is the latest technology and pretty powerful in terms of the high availability of the virtual server."
"SQL Server is widely used and it's simple. You cannot do without Microsoft if you want to manage IT for a business customer."
"The performance is good."
"Its usability is very good. Its performance is satisfactory."
"It is easy to use and easy to perform a backup."
"The main feature of this solution is ease of use."
"I value the ability it gives me to test on small machines and easily scale up to larger devices for live applications."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"The solution's support could be better."
"SQL Server doesn't have proper bitmap indexing, proper columnar databases, or proper implementation of materialized views."
"Only one CPU core can be used. Can’t move a database between servers easily. Can’t use triggers."
"Performance could be improved."
"Primarily, the data replication and the backup areas can be improved. It should have data replication capabilities and uptime capabilities."
"There are certain shortcomings in the scalability of the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The performance degrades when the data is huge."
"Scalability is an area that needs improvement, and the deployment is difficult, which why I'm looking for an appliance to deploy it in a much more scalable way."
"Better integration with other platforms would be an improvement."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and QlikView.
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