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."The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"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."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"It is a stable product."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We have found the solution to be scalable."
"One of the things I most like about SQL Server is the log shipping piece. This is a great feature."
"The solution can be used for a host of applications."
"It's a very stable solution."
"It will do clustering, so you can have two database servers looking at the same data simultaneously."
"We are using the net for our environment. We're using the ADF Azure data factory for our analysis services, and it is pretty good."
"The most valuable feature of SQL Server is that it is easy to set up."
"The availability is the most valuable feature. It has high availability. It also has good performance."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"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."
"It could have more options for themes."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"I would say that people should know how to get a SQL setup in place since it might be an area where they lack when it comes to the solution."
"They do not offer the SQL Server Management tool via the installation. It is a separate tool I use when I'm trying to configure the mirroring with SQL Server Mirroring. This is not supported and I'm getting some errors on the database mirroring."
"Maintenance of the solution is an area of concern, and improvements can be helpful."
"They have too many licensing options. They may want to simplify its licensing and bring it down to two, three, or four categories from ten to fifteen categories. Having so many different licensing options makes it difficult to decide which one to choose from. They can club things together. This is an area where they can make things easier for customers."
"SQL Server could improve the integration with nonrational database solutions, such as MongoDB."
"Occasionally the performance, as good as it is, is a bit off. We sometimes experience memory spiking. If they could maybe fix that aspect of the solution, that would be quite helpful for our organization."
"The performance is not always the best."
"The solution is lacking a compound index for comparing values."
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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