IBM Netezza Performance Server Reviews

• Ease of use
• Lack of performance problems for analytics and massive data systems
• Integration with Linux-based ETL and data streaming technologies
• Integration with distributed computing platforms

It has been the primary driving technology behind the corporate wide transition to Netezza as a standard data platform. A whole ecosystem is beginning to develop around the product.

It is not designed for transactional systems. Transactional systems that require frequent updates, deletes, etc should use a different solution.

Netezza does not perform well with a significant volume of individual record operations. Netezza is designed specifically for set based operations.

Netezza does not perform well with a significant volume of individual record operations. Netezza is designed specifically for set based operations.

The appliance is installed and maintained by vendor.

Neteeza is a data warehouse for customer analytics. 

We're looking to get away from it, so I can't really say that it improved things. It did augment some of our product delivery resources.

The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format. The appliance format may be the best part.

There won't be another release. They're converting to DB2 and that is one of the reasons we are looking at other options.

In terms of features that I would like to see, one is the ability to actually scale out an architecture. Right now, if you buy one, it's fixed. There is no scale-up availability at all.

It's pretty good when it works. It's pretty stable overall. But if you have a problem, support is a nightmare.

Scalability is not possible.

Technical support has been awful. I found them unwilling to help, and with direct VPN connection to systems, unwilling to actually connect and look at information, which is part of our contract. They did not actually do their job.

We're looking to switch away from Netezza because the platform database system that it runs on is no longer going to be in existence. It's moving to DB2. If it moves to that direction, the amount of changes in logic and queries that it would require is pretty substantial. At that point I would basically be rewriting everything.

When selecting a vendor, obviously I don't want somebody who is brand new. I want somebody who has a track record of actually being around for awhile. It needs to be a company with a product that does the functions that a database should do, and not something that's only a partial solution. There are a lot of solutions out there that do three-quarters of what a warehouse should be doing, but three-quarters of a warehouse are not sufficient.

I wasn't involved in the setup. But it's an appliance, so there is no real setup, other than there is a day for an IBM technician to come out and stand it up.

Vertica was one of them. I looked at it recently. It has limiting factors on things like updates and deletes of data, where it has performance issues. That's a big problem for us. 

I rate Netezza at four out of 10. There is not too much involved to set one up from a customer perspective, but after the initial setup it is pretty awful on the customer support side of it.

My advice would be, check out all options. Don't just go with big-name vendors, because that is not always going to be the right answer.

For now, we use that as our enterprise-wide data warehouse. Performance-wise, it's been great. The speed has been excellent. We haven't really had any hardware issues with it that I'm aware of. We've had it for heavy-use in the past six months to a year. It's been good.

The big benefit that we've had is, in the past with the legacy data warehouse solution, we've been limited to having just a nightly batch, running on SQL Server. It's a slower batch process, so throughout the day we would be limited to stuff that happened as of some time in the evening. 

So the benefit is really because of the additional speed that we have and, truth be told, the more updated ETL processes and the revamped scheduler in general. We've been able to move the refresh timing up to six times a day, so at any given point in the day, the data would be only four hours old, which helps us give much better - not quite real-time data - but closer to real-time data for the day, which helps the decision-makers get the most up-to-date information possible.

The speed.

I would say it's very stable. Whenever we have any sort of outage, the hardware team always communicates it, and it's been months since we've had any sort of outage, outside of the standard maintenance window. There have never really been any issues there. Stability has been good.

For scalability, we're still in process - half the business is still not on this data warehouse, the company is also moving over to a different production system - so the scalability, we'll really see throughout this year, as the rest of the business gets migrated over to that new production system, and that data will be falling into the Netezza data warehouse platform. So for scalability, it's a little too soon to really give an answer yet.

I have not used tech support. I'm not on the hardware team.

Our IT leadership made the decision to go with Netezza before I joined the company, that decision had already been made. Prior to that we were using Microsoft SQL Server.

The only thing that I was really privy to was, Netezza was chosen because of its analytical capabilities and for the ability to process through a very high volume of records and give an aggregate solution from an analysis standpoint, in a very quick fashion.

I was not involved on the hardware side, but I was on the data modeling aspect.

I would say it was straightforward. We used the IBM InfoSphere for the ETL scripts. Those seem to give plenty of visibility for allthe different steps in the ETL process, especially debugging or going in and making modifications as different tickets come through.

Working with some of the other developers, whenever they are given a ticket, it's pretty simple to see what step in the process and additional code needs to be added, or modified, or removed; to see exactly where it is and how it's going to affect things downstream, and to be able to see at what exact point that something has failed. That part, it's been more straightforward and just the visibility of the whole process.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for a data warehouse solution are, obviously, the speed and the ability to handle large amounts of data. That's especially true from an analysis standpoint, and having it not only do the math and select statements but also do more aggregation and analysis-type queries.

The speed has been excellent for us, in pulling information, as well as the batch timing, and the suite of tools that comes with it for the ETL withIBM InfoSphere. Also, the data governance prospect, as a company we haven't really delved too far into that, but from what I've seen, that is a really powerful tool as well, to help with data lineage and keeping track of that. So the speed is good and the suite of tools seems to be very beneficial.

From my standpoint, I would give it a nine out of 10. It has done everything that we needed it to do, it's great. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because, early on, there were a couple of maintenance things that we had to do.

Cross-database writing and more UDFs.

Netezza NPS 7.1 has added a feature of SET CATALOG

This also allows users to run GROOM, GENERATE STATISTICS etc. in the block as a single execution (auto commit).

Simplified development process with less administration

Distribution (no index or partition), built-in analytics is a major advantange.

It has improved our management information systems and reporting capabilities.

It should also consider cloud based solutions.

We have been using the solution for more than ten years from the 8000 series,

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

I can't extend the storage, only up to 6x compress of data. You need to plan this when selecting the right product to buy.

Netezza support is good.

We used Oracle previously. The performance required less maintenance when comparing index and data maintenance issues.

The setup took only a few hours with all built-in apps. It is very quick and easy to use.

One license and one support, also cheaper compared to other products.

We evaluated MS SQL server.

It is easy to use. Make sure you select the right ETL and reporting tool. Also select the right tool for the organization to hold it in the long run.

It has a compression engine and FPGA on but you should still analyze your volume of data and decide on the right model and size.

• Performance
• Simplicity
• Few things to worry about

Netezza technology has served us perfectly well. It is the server for our all BI data.

Our overall business intelligence has improved.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward.

It was done by an in-house team with assistance from some IBM consultants who had very good knowledge about Netezza.

Very good. Our BI enviroment with Netezza, Cognos and Data Stage has been a great success

The in-house team and IBM consultants suggested the solution. There is a partnership between IBM and our corporation.

It is a very good product. Like always, good people with good expertise will help a lot

Personally, I like the Compression and Partitioning features.

It has the capacity to handle terabytes of data with query response times that are very low. This has helped us a lot.

It’s a good product for analytical processing, but they need to conduct more seminars and hands-on training and events. They need to be showcasing the product and features to create awareness among businesses.

I have been working on it for the last two-and-a-half years and now we are in process of a tech refresh. We’re moving from the old Netezza to the newer IBM Pure Data Analytics, using a quarter of the rack for Pure Data.

No issues encountered with deployment.

No issues encountered with stability.

No issues encountered with scalability.

They're very good, helpful, and knowledgeable.

It’s a complex setup.

It was handled by the vendor as it's proprietary.

It's fit for the purpose it's designed for. It's an analytical/hierarchical database, now in great demand, that can store plenty of data and return the results in no time for complex queries.

We use Netezza and Teradata in our project environment where I work as an admin and data modeler.

Distribution concurrency control.

Concurrency limit needs to be increased somewhat.

Great stability in Netazza's Mako.

As of now, no issues with scalability. But like Teradata, we can’t add a node/SPU to the existing appliance.

I work with IBM PDA support. They are wonderful and fix issues in good time.

We used Teradata for Data Mart for certain applications but issues arose once the data setup grew. Using PDA, the issues were resolved.

Setup is not that complex. Within 24 hours we had everything completed and had copied the dataset from Oracle. Our migration approach was to use a shell script (pipe).

Best if you have a robust infrastructure, where network bandwidth is good. We used 10GB Ethernet cable for data transfer.