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IBM Netezza Performance Server vs Spark SQL comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

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

IBM Netezza Performance Server
Ranking in Hadoop
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (12th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of IBM Netezza Performance Server is 6.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Spark SQL5.3%
IBM Netezza Performance Server6.1%
Other88.6%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

Shiv Subramaniam Koduvayur - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at MAF Retail
Parallel data processing streamlines operations while cost and cloud integration challenge adoption
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only available in AWS, and in the Middle East, it is not well-developed in the Azure environment. For the cost to be reduced, it should match competitors. Many features need to be incorporated on the cloud.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have sub-second query performance, and users are happy with the product."
"Netezza is an easy-to-use data warehouse appliance; it's extremely fast with a low cost and the customers run their BI and advanced analytics in a very flexible manner."
"For every organization that I have been in that has Netezza, the ability to load and run queries is greatly simplified and A LOT faster than any other DBMS out there."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server is a cost-effective solution."
"Setup is not that complex. Within 24 hours we had everything completed and had copied the dataset from Oracle."
"We are able to execute very complex queries. Over 90 percent of our query executions are one second or less. We do millions of queries everyday."
"The performance of the solution is its most valuable feature. The solution is easy to administer as well. It's very user-friendly. On the technical side, the architecture is simple to understand and you don't need too many administrators to handle the solution."
"Those reports were improved from a couple of hours to minutes."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"Spark SQL gives us a handful of methods to design queries based on its own syntax and also incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."
"The speed of getting data, as our TBs are big and it's a lot of data."
"It is a stable solution."
"Certain data sets that are very large are very difficult to process with Pandas and Python libraries. Spark SQL has helped us a lot with that."
 

Cons

"Disaster recovery support. Because it was an appliance, and if you wanted to support disaster recovery, you needed to buy two."
"Concurrency limit needs to be increased somewhat."
"Stability comes and goes."
"Netezza does not scale like other databases, so it cannot run several queries at once."
"Matching up with big data. Netezza has been built only for OLAP and structured data, and I think IBM must do something to match it to Hadoop scalability."
"Service support costs are high."
"Data lineage on column or even object level does not exist, therefore external applications have to be used"
"We tried to install a newer version of NZA not supported by the version of Netezza we had and it did not work."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly. I probably need more information or knowledge. In other database solutions, you can easily optimize all partitions. I haven't found a quicker way to do that in Spark SQL. It would be good if you don't need a partition here, and the system automatically partitions in the best way. They can also provide more educational resources for new users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very expensive. It has a lot CPUs with a lot of components in it. It also has built-in redundancy for resiliency reasons."
"Expensive to maintain compared to other solutions."
"The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"Netezza is a costly solution. It does serve a specific purpose but it's costlier than what's available in the market, if you go to the cloud."
"For me, mainly, it reduces my costs. It's not only the appliance cost. There are also support costs and a maintenance costs. It does reduce the costs very drastically."
"The annual licensing fees are twenty-two percent of the product cost."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
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Comparison Review

it_user232068 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 5, 2015
Netezza vs. Teradata
Original published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-i-choose-net Two leading Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architectures for Data Warehousing (DW) are IBM PureData System for Analytics (formerly Netezza) and Teradata. I thought talking about the similarities and differences…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
University
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise33
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only availab...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The solution has generally received positive feedback from me and is recommended for continued use by end users. However, the product cost is high compared to others in the market, and this cost ha...
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Also Known As

Netezza Performance Server, Netezza, Netezza Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Seattle Childrens Hospital, Carphone Warehouse, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Battelle, Start Today Co. Ltd., Kelley Blue Book, Trident Marketing, Elisa Corporation, Catalina Marketing, iBasis, Barnes & Noble, Qualcomm, MediaMath, Acxiom, iBasis, Foxwoods
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Netezza Performance Server vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.