Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. SingleStore

IBM analytics has continued to improve upon the days of being the original core metrics. After using the updated version for quite some time, it has been great at providing the needed analytics to measure ROI and goal performance for our quarterly KPI's. It has resulted in a great increase in web engagements although we are a midsize company, smaller outfits may not need such an expensive option.

Incentivized

SingleStore HTAP engine is well suited for real-time analytics, fast ingestion, scaling OLTP system like MySQL. When you need to run reports or perform aggregates on billions of rows and you get result in seconds, you cannot get this experience with other OLTP engines. I wish DBtLab was a little more developer and supported for SingleStore. This would allow to perform better data transformation. You can use stored procedures, but DBTLabs has become a standard for dimensional modeling in data warehousing projects. This is probably why SingleStore has trouble piercing in the data warehouse world. It is definately capable to compete with Snowflake when it comes to scalability, query performance, data compression, but Snowflake has ravaged the data warehouse market in few years and large corporations have already invested lots of money in migrating into Snowflake. The SingleStore community needs to grow. Everyone who uses SingleStore loves it.

• IBM CXA comprises an acquisition called Tealeaf. This tool has deep heritage and this is evident in its present-day capabilities.
• The Universal Behaviour Exchange or UBX puts the concept of personalisation at the forefront. The ability to combine physical (analog) and digital transactions to create the complete picture of a customer journey, is a stand out benefit.
• The solution does not have to involve the purchase of software. IBM CXA can be sold as a service bundled with analytics as a service. This not only lowers the cost of ownership, it gets around one of the principal issues. Strong staff with design and analytical capability to drive the solution and deliver tangible benefits.
• The seamless integration of Watson AI services to help with the heavy lifiting. Watson reinforces the analytical focus this solution has and can learn to recognise situations specific to a company.

Incentivized

• Technical support is stellar -- far above and beyond anything I've experienced with any other company.
• When we compared SingleStore to other databases two years ago, we found SingleStore performance to be far superior.
• Pipeline data ingestion is exceptionally fast.
• The ability to combine transactional and analytical workloads without compromising performance is very impressive.

Incentivized

• The user interface is in Flash, which can be very frustrating and slow at times. Apparently, this is to be transitioned in a future release.
• Can only segment the last 93 days of data. Any historical segmentation beyond the 93 days must be run in Explore (which is credit based, and has its own limitations with the number of credits per month, based on the initial contract with IBM).
• Reports can only display 93 days of data at a given time for custom date ranges. There are pre-programmed date ranges setup with IBM during implementation (last week, last month, last quarter etc.), but are not flexible enough to answer more specific questions.
• Certain reports cannot have segments applied, making answering some simple questions a bit more tricky. For example, I can create a segment around mobile devices and apply it to the marketing channels report, but I can't create a marketing channel segment and apply it to the mobile reports.
• Built in API calls allows for nice report design and automation.

• We wish the product had better support for High Availability of the aggregator. Currently the indexes generated by the two different aggregators are not in the same sequential space and so our apps have more burden to deal with HA.
• More tools for debugging issues such as high memory usage would be good.
• The price was the one that kept us away from purchasing for the first few years. Now we are able to afford due to a promotion that gives it at 25% of the list price. Not sure if we'll continue after the promotion offer expires in another 2 years.

Incentivized

IBM Digital Analytics is a great solution for our clients and I believe they offer the best solution for the retail space. We have access to IBM support via email or live chat and they can answer many of the reporting questions that come up. IBM is receptive to our feedback of the product so I am confident they will continue making improvements

We haven't seen a faster relation database. Period. Which is why we are super happy customers and will for sure renew our license.

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.

Incentivized

Never had any issues

We have not experienced any downtime in the two years that we have been using SingleStore.

Incentivized

As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.

SingleStore's performance is incredible. Our predictive algorithms went from taking 24-48 HOURS down to 15 minutes allowing our team to run those much more frequently. Previously, we were limited to about 60 requests per minute due to table locks. Implementing columnstore on SingleStore allowed us to receive 1000 requests per minute.

Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.

Very responsive to trouble tickets - Often, I think, the SingleStore's monitoring systems have already alerted the engineers by the time I get around to writing a ticket (about 10 - 20 mins after we see a problem). I feel like things are escalated nicely and SingleStore takes resolving trouble tickets seriously. Also SingleStore follows up after incidents to with a post mortem and actionable takaways to improve the product. Very satisfied here.

Incentivized

Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.

Incentivized

Much of the work we did in IBM Digital Analytics could have been answered through Google Analytics, a much simpler, agile and FREE solution set. Not mention, given the vast number of Google Analytics USERS, free and actionable support is simply a click away ... this compared to IBM Digital Analytics fractured and often absent support service.

Timescale was the biggest alternative option we looked at for SingleStore, however the requirement to learn a new syntax (due to not being SQL compatible) was our biggest pain point. Supporting a new language would require alterations to the Laravel framework, as this only offered SQL integration out of the box. This alteration would be time consuming and would limit our scope to future hiring due to the new syntax.

Incentivized

This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.

We needed more memory on our cluster. SingleStore handled it very smoothly.

Incentivized

• We spend too much time trying to work around bugs on the new UI.
• We spend too much time trying to figure out how to make certain segments work because support and the knowledge center are lackluster.
• Our sales rep is very unresponsive and leaves us searching for a lot of answers on our own, including what other products we may benefit from that IBM offers.

Incentivized

• As the overall performance and functionality were expanded, we are able to deliver our data much faster than before, which increases the demand for data.
• Metadata is available in the platform by default, like metadata on the pipelines. Also, the information schema has lots of metadata, making it easy to load our assets to the data catalog.