IBM Netezza Performance Server Reviews & Product Details

I use this application everyday for writing sql queries and it a very friendly and helpful tool because of its easy to use features and ability to connect to multiple instances of schema. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Look and Feel should be improved. Previous sessions are not being stored sometimes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Netezza is an old player in the DW world. They were one of the first to come out with a commercially available Data Warehouse Appliance. They've also made great improvements along the way. The sheer processing power of the appliance makes most jobs run without any issues. The analytic functions provided have also proven to be very useful. It is also easy to set up a distribution key so you know how the data is being sharded across all the nodes. Another thing I like are the CLI tools. NZLOAD for example has been an integral part of our near real time load process. NZMIGRATE has proven to be a great database copy tool. I could go on, but there are definitely some great tools included with this product. I would recommend to at least speak with an IBM representative to see if this Appliance is right for you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes the SQL language Netezza uses (it's a PostreSQL variant) can get a little annoying. But if you're used to PostreSQL you can certainly get up and running. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its very fast when compared to other DBs present. Aginity tool by IBM is great to work on the Netezza DB. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As you adopt this DB, you have to make few changes for your builtin functions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is straightforward interface, useful when I just want to dump out data and process it in C or R. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It needs a more powerful query builder and a more updated GUI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Extremely fast is designed properly, even with terabytes of data. You will never go back to oracle or any traditional db's once using netezza Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SQL toolkit functions is not extensive like Oracle and not many parellel processes allowed Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I was introduced to Netezza in a research project in Dalhousie university a couple of months ago. Since then, I believe Netezza is definitely one of the best machines for big data analytics. Having well designed HPC techniques in any single part, I found it well tuned, fast and easy to use. There are some good and free client applications available to manage the server and run scripts.

One thing which is amazing is its built-in DBA that work as a 24-7 support team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unlike its well written official documents, there are almost no active user community on Netezza topics. Having said that, it is sometimes very tough to find a solution to an obvious question. I checked only three different client management tools to work with it. They shared one thing in common that is all of them provide something that the other two doesn't provide. This results to have all of them and work on different client tools to have everything done. In addition, the official IBM client that comes with Netezza can be said to be the worst of them.

In addition, lack of demos or tutorials on very common problems is another issue that I think should be added to Netezza official document. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Less Administration Required

Easy to move data and fetch data Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Since this is unix based less user interface available to manage. Need better managements tools with intuitive user interface. Provide more utilities to manage performance and reporting about performance. Need utility to migration of code and data.

Difficulty finding material about Natezza or books and best practice related documents

Finding resources developers and dba is very hard

In Nashville are you going to do some conference? Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture is very strong feature of this appliance which helps in running ugly time consuming warehouse report queries very fast - These would have taken forever to run on other RDBMS databases. The key is the fact that most of the unwanted data is filtered (projection and restriction) as close to the disk as possible. Standard SQL queries can be used with the appliance which makes it easier for porting existing applications and avoid a new learning curve in that front.

If the best practices are followed in terms of distribution keys, data-types etc. you can get real good performance boost.

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Since this is an appliance, it has many hardware components inside and we have experienced lots of sporadic hardware failures - we are then at the mercy of IBM to replace them (Scheduling, webX, field Engg) which really reflects on the SLA. Many companies have complained about the Moose disks (bad batch of disks) which had to be completely replaced. For small shops this could be really inconvenient.

There aren't enough active user community for Netezza and so it gets very difficult sometimes. You again would need to open a ticket with IBM and get understanding of what it is (eg - SEU single bit vs Multi bit error) and get some documentation on the issues.

Also dislike the fact that the catalog backup pauses the system. (Understand that the catalog is in the host file system) But if IBM can allow a hot catalog backup, that would be very useful.

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Lightning fast performance even with half of Terra byte Size of Tables

Very fast loading and offloading of Data

Faster Backup and restore Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Keys are not enforced

Small bugs. i.e. Different SPU may have different system Time resulting into different time stamps while loading data into tables or in similar use cases

Database generated surrogate keys are not in Order - although it doesn't matter much

Slow Updates

Costly

Lack of maturity observed at some occasions where it went down due to silly reasons- i.e Query getting queued up Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The hardware platform approach surely is the core processing power behind Netezza. The ability to run standard SQL queries is a huge plus as this helps development and eliminates yet another language learning curve. With multi server architecture the performance improvements are easily realized. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The performance of the system seems to break down with implementation of views, especially layers of views. The appliance is designed around table joins and so I think its best to avoid views or at least keep them non nested. That means creating more tables and more ETL. Any table once organized and distributed on particular set of columns only those queries will see advantage, so if you have a huge variety of queries against that table then not all of them will see improvements. Another pain was disk failures and the fact that IBM certified technician has to come to replace the disks every time. I was just surprised by the rate of failures! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.