IBM Db2 Database and CockroachDB compete in the database industry, serving enterprise-level customers. While both have their strengths, CockroachDB's cloud capabilities and user-friendly deployment give it an edge in cloud environments.
Features: IBM Db2 Database offers robust SQL dialect capabilities, platform versatility, and self-tuning memory management that optimize performance. It ensures reliability and integration with other IBM products. Db2 is known for its stability, scalability, and security, appealing to industries like banking. CockroachDB is recognized for its distributed nature, geo-replication, and fault tolerance, making it suitable for global applications. It supports SQL and is compatible with PostgreSQL, enabling scalability and availability in cloud deployments.
Room for Improvement: IBM Db2 faces challenges with a steep learning curve, complex licensing, and limited training and support resources. Cloud integration and administration complexity can be improved. CockroachDB could enhance PostgreSQL compatibility, disaster recovery features, and serverless pricing models. Better documentation and language support are needed to cater to a broader audience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Db2 is mainly deployed on-premises, with hybrid and private cloud options less advanced than CockroachDB's cloud capabilities. IBM's technical support is generally helpful but can be delayed or complex. CockroachDB benefits from simpler architecture and flexible deployment options. IBM’s customer service is robust but can be complex, while CockroachDB offers straightforward engagement.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Db2's pricing is often viewed as high due to complex licensing and mainframe costs, yet it provides significant ROI through performance. CockroachDB offers flexible pricing suitable for small to large enterprise solutions, with transparent and flexible pricing leading to positive ROI for performance.
The issue was resolved efficiently.
We normally receive substantial discounts on the price.
For multi-region deployment, CockroachDB requires at least three plus replicas across data centers to achieve strong consistency across regions, which increases infrastructure costs including compute, storage, and networking.
It might be slightly slower than other database vendors, but it works well since banks typically do not move quickly with leading-edge technology.
CockroachDB's geo-distribution feature is superior to traditional databases.
IBM Db2 Database, because of enterprise performance and support, is why banks still maintain their relationship with it.
The IBM Db2 Database is trusted, and IT effort is less than any other product.
Product | Market Share (%) |
---|---|
IBM Db2 Database | 7.6% |
CockroachDB | 4.2% |
Other | 88.2% |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 7 |
Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
Large Enterprise | 5 |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 20 |
Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
Large Enterprise | 48 |
Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the cloud-native, resilient, distributed SQL database enterprises worldwide trust to run mission-critical AI and other applications that scale fast, avert and survive disaster, and thrive everywhere. It runs on the Big 3 clouds, on prem, and in hybrid configurations powering Fortune 500, Forbes Global 2000, and Inc. 5000 brands, and game-changing innovators, including OpenAI, CoreWeave, Adobe, Netflix, Booking.com, DoorDash, FanDuel, Cisco, P&G, UiPath, Fortinet, Roblox, EA, BestBuy, SpaceX, Nvidia, the USVA, and HPE. Cockroach Labs has customers in 40+ countries across all world regions, 25+ verticals, and 50+ Use Cases. Cockroach Labs operates its own ISV Partner Ecosystem powering Payments, Identity Management (IDM/IAM), Banking & Wallet, Trading, and other high-demand use cases. Cockroach Labs is an AWS Partner of the Year finalist and has achieved AWS Competency Partner certifications in Data & Analytics and Financial Services (FSI). CockroachDB pricing is available at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/
Vector, RAG, and GenAI Workloads
CockroachDB includes native support for the VECTOR data type and pgvector API compatibility, enabling storage and retrieval of high-dimensional embeddings. These vector capabilities are critical for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and GenAI workloads that rely on similarity search and contextual embeddings. By supporting distributed vector indexing within the database itself, CockroachDB removes the need for external vector stores and allows AI applications to operate against a single, consistent data layer.
C-SPANN Distributed Indexing
At the core of CockroachDB’s vector search capabilities is the C-SPANN indexing engine. C-SPANN provides scalable approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search across billions of vectors while supporting incremental updates, real-time writes, and partitioned indexing. This ensures low-latency retrieval in the tens of milliseconds, even under high query throughput. The algorithm eliminates central coordinators, avoids large in-memory structures, and leverages CockroachDB’s sharding and replication to deliver scale, resilience, and global consistency.
Machine Learning and Apache Spark Integration
CockroachDB integrates with modern ML workflows by supporting embeddings generated through frameworks such as AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. Its compatibility with the PostgreSQL JDBC driver allows seamless integration with Apache Spark, enabling distributed processing and advanced analytics on CockroachDB data.
PostgreSQL Compatibility and JSON Support
CockroachDB speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so applications, drivers, and tools designed to work with Postgres can connect to CockroachDB without modification, enabling seamless use of familiar SQL features and integration with the wider Postgres ecosystem. This includes support for advanced data types such as JSON and JSONB, which allow developers to store and query semi-structured data natively.
Geospatial and Graph Capabilities
CockroachDB also provides first-class geospatial data support, allowing developers to store, query, and analyze spatial data directly in SQL. For graph workloads, CockroachDB employs JSON flexibility to represent relationships and delivers query capabilities for graph-like traversals. This combination enables hybrid applications that merge relational, geospatial, document, and graph data within a single platform.
Analytics, BI, and Integration
To support high-performance analytics and BI, CockroachDB supports core analytical use cases and functions including Enterprise Data Warehouse, Lakehouse, and Event Analytics, and offers materialized views for precomputing complex joins and aggregations. Its PostgreSQL wire compatibility ensures direct connectivity with all relevant BI and analytics apps and tools including Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Kafka, Google BigQuery, Salesforce Tableau, Databricks, Cognos, Looker, Grafana, Power BI, Qlik Sense, SAP, SAS, Sisense, and TIBCO Spotfire. Data scientists can interact with CockroachDB through Jupyter Notebooks, querying structured and semi-structured data and loading results for analysis. Change data capture (CDC) streams provide real-time updates to analytics pipelines and feature stores, keeping downstream systems fresh and reliable. Columnar vectorized execution accelerates query processing, optimizes transactional throughput, and minimizes latency for demanding distributed workloads.
MOLT AI-Powered Migration
Organizations often know their data infrastructure is not supporting the business, but find it too painful to change. CockroachDB’s MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology) is designed to enable safe, minimal-downtime database migrations from legacy systems to CockroachDB. MOLT Fetch supports data migration from PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, with SQL Server and DB2 coming soon. CockroachDB also has a portfolio of data replication platform integrations including Precisely, Striim, Qlik, Confluent, IBM, etc.
Together, these capabilities ensure that CockroachDB supports both operational and analytical workloads, bridging traditional SQL applications with emerging Gen AI and ML use cases.
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