Likelihood to Recommend I could think of a couple but the obvious is in Fintech and Retail, because of the amount of transactional and event level data for global operations. It is imperative to have a solution that can handle such large scale date, in real-time and batch delivery for inbound and outbound delivery, and ultimately ensuring that workload management is supported in some cases for around the clock SLAs.
Read full review Actian matrix is not good for small data sets. If you have a limited data pool, or do not plan on having multiple users/clients accessing a data source, stick with a more traditional relational database model - Access for the truly small user base, or a DB2 or Oracle back end if your going to have multiple users, and moderate sized data. Actian is for LARGE data sets (Big Data, in the industry parlance). Millions of rows of data from multiple sources with various down stream systems accessing the database. It is for data analytics of large data groups and intense data mining.
Read full review Pros DB2 maintains itself very well. The Task Scheduler component of DB2 allows for statistics gathering and reorganization of indexes and tables without user interaction or without specific knowledge of cron or Windows Task Scheduler / Scheduled jobs. Its use of ASYNC, NEARSYNC, and SYNC HADR (High Availability Disaster Recovery ) models gives you a range of options for maintaining a very high uptime ratio. Failover from PRIMARY to SECONDARY becomes very easy with just a single command or windowed mouse click. Task Scheduler ( DB2 9.7 and earlier ) allows for jobs to be run within other jobs, and exit and error codes can define what other jobs are run. This allows for ease of maintenance without third party softwares. Tablespace usage and automatic storage help keep your data segmented while at rest, making partitioning easier. Ability to run commands via CLI (Command Line Interface) or via Control Center / Data Studio ( DB2 10.x+) makes administration a breeze. Read full review Super fast. Aggregate query such as SUM(), Count() returns result within seconds from a table with more than billion records. Excellent data compression. Easy maintenance. We managed this database without having a full time DBA. Support ANSI SQL and ODBC/JDBC. It's easy to connect to this database from other systems. Read full review Cons The relational model requires a rigid schema that does not necessarily fit with some types of modern development. Proprietary database, requires a lot of Hardware for its good performance and its costs are high. As data grows in production environment, it becomes slow. Read full review Some of the bugs were annoying and QA definitely needs improvement Connectivity to Informatica and ETL providers Workload management could be better like when you compare with Teradata Read full review Likelihood to Renew The DB2 database is a solid option for our school. We have been on this journey now for 3-4 years so we are still adapting to what it can do. We will renew our use of DB2 because we don’t see. Major need to change. Also, changing a main database in a school environment is a major project, so we’ll avoid that if possible.
Read full review Usability You have to be well versed in using the technology, not only from a GUI interface but from a command line interface to successfully use this software to its fullest.
Read full review I wish to give higher rating for the speed and efficiency in handling the queries, but only 6 because of consistent bugs we encounter
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have never had DB2 go down unexpectedly. It just works solidly every day. When I look at the logs, sometimes DB2 has figured out there was a need to build an index. Instead of waiting for me to do it, the database automatically created the index for me. At my current company, we have had zero issues for the past 8 years. We have upgrade the server 3 times and upgraded the OS each time and the only thing we saw was that DB2 got better and faster. It is simply amazing.
Read full review Performance The performances are exceptional if you take care to maintain the database. It is a very powerful tool and at the same time very easy to use. In our installation, we expect a DB machine on the mainframe with access to the database through ODBC connectors directly from branch servers, with fabulous end users experience.
Read full review Support Rating Easily the best product support team. :) Whenever we have questions, they have answered those in a timely manner and we like how they go above and beyond to help.
Read full review Faster initial response Trained professionals Very helpful in resolving issues Read full review In-Person Training the material was very clear and all subjects have been handled
Read full review Implementation Rating db2 work well with the application, also the replication tool can keep it up
Read full review Leader failover setup is the toughest and lack of proper documentation is making things tough.
Read full review Alternatives Considered DB2 was more scalable and easily configurable than other products we evaluated and short listed in terms of functionality and pricing. IBM also had a good demo on premise and provided us a sandbox experience to test out and play with the product and DB2 at that time came out better than other similar products.
Read full review Actian Matrix is our first big data analytics storage platform, and as I was not involved in the POC process to compare it to other products out on the market, unfortunately I cannot say if it is better than other Big Data storage options. I can say that it out performs products such as Oracle or UDB in regards to the volume of data it can easily index and handle.
Read full review Scalability By using DB2 only to support my IzPCA activities, my knowledge here is somewhat limited.
Anyway, from what I was able to understand, DB2 is extremely scallable.
Maybe the information below could serve as an example of scalability.
Customer have an huge mainframe environment, 13x z15 CECs, around 80 LPARs, and maybe more than 50 Sysplexes (I am not totally sure about this last figure...)
Today we have 7 IzPCA databases, each one in a distinct Syplex.
Plans are underway to have, at the end, an small LPAR, with only one DB2 sub-system, and with only one database, then transmit the data from a lot of other LPARs, and then process all the data in this only one database.
The IzPCA collect process (read the data received, manipulate it, and insert rows in the tables) today is a huge process, demanding many elapsed hours, and lots of CPU.
Almost 100% of the tables are PBR type, insert jobs run in parallel, but in 4 of the 7 database, it is a really a huge and long process.
Combining the INSERTs loads from the 7 databases in only one will be impossible .......,,,,
But, IzPCA recently introduced a new feature, called "Continuous Collector" .
By using that feature, small amounts of data will be transmited to the central LPAR at every 5 minutes (or even less), processed immediately ,in a short period of time, and with small use of CPU , instead of one or two transmissions by day, of very large amounts of data and the corresponding collect jobs occurring only once or twice a day, with long elapsed times, and huge comsumption of CPU
I suspect the total CPU seconds consumed will be more or less the same in both cases, but in the new method it will occur in small bursts many times a day!!
Read full review Return on Investment Fast response time by processing optimization and cost reduction by reduced CPU utilization. Nowadays, good performance is a necessary condition for the survival of a company and its sustained growth SQL enhancements are targeted to improve performance, simplify current and new applications, and reduce the development cycle time to market. A CPU reduction at peak times can immediately reduce our TCO by reducing software costs related to CPU utilization. Impressive reductions in memory requirements, which used to limit the concurrent database activity Out-of-the-box savings without changing the database or application Read full review ROI is great, less spending on full time DBA and that money could be use to add additional node. Negative - Not many developers are well aware of this tool, it takes some time to learn. Read full review ScreenShots