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IBM Netezza Performance Server vs Spark SQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 30, 2025

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
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (13th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of IBM Netezza Performance Server is 5.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 6.6%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Spark SQL6.6%
IBM Netezza Performance Server5.0%
Other88.4%
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.
Sahil Taneja - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant/Manager at Tenzing
Easy to use and do not require a learning curve
Spark SQL can improve the documentation they have provided. It can be a bit unclear at times. They could improve the documentation a bit more so that we can understand it more easily. Moreover, they could improve SparkUI to have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Speed contributes to large capacity."
"The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format."
"Parallel data processing is a significant feature for me."
"Distribution concurrency control."
"The need for administration involvement is quite limited on the solution."
"The data governance prospect... from what I've seen, that is a really powerful tool as well, to help with data lineage and keeping track of that."
"The most valuable features of the IBM Netezza Performance Server are the NPS server because of the reduced maintenance and overall good performance."
"It is a back end for our SSIS, MicroStrategy,, Tableau. All of these are connecting to get the data. To do so we are also using our analytics which is built on the data."
"Offers a variety of methods to design queries and incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"It is a stable solution."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"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."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"Oracle Exadata's security features, like TDE encryption, are missing in IBM Netezza Performance Server."
"This product is being discontinued from IBM, and I would like to have some kind of upgrade available."
"I'm not sure of IBM's roadmap currently, as the solution is coming up on its end of life."
"In-DB processing with SAS Analytics, since this is supposed to be an analytics server so the expectation is there."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server could improve its interface, support for big data, and APA-based connectivity should be available."
"The only issue is that it's not expandable."
"Our main problem with it is concurrency. When there are too many users running Netezza at the same time, this is when we have the most complaints."
"We are not able to scale. The only way to scale is to get another appliance, but we have a customers who would need us to hydrate the data between the two appliances, and Netezza does not do that."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"There are many inconsistencies in syntax for the different querying tasks."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"In the next update, we'd like to see better performance for small points of data. It is possible but there are better tools that are faster and cheaper."
 

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."
"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."
"The annual licensing fees are twenty-two percent of the product cost."
"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 solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"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."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"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."
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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
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Performing Arts
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
University
15%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise33
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise5
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...
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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: December 2025.
880,255 professionals have used our research since 2012.