Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a highly scalable and cost-effective data lake solution for big data analytics. It combines the power of a high-performance file system with massive scale and economy to help you speed your time to insight. Data Lake Storage Gen2 extends Azure Blob Storage capabilities and is optimized for analytics workloads.
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Db2 Big SQL
Score 9.0 out of 10
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IBM offers Db2 Big SQL, an enterprise grade hybrid ANSI-compliant SQL on Hadoop engine, delivering massively parallel processing (MPP) and advanced data query. Big SQL offers a single database connection or query for disparate sources such as HDFS, RDMS, NoSQL databases, object stores and WebHDFS.
Azure Data Lake is an absolutely essential piece of a modern data and analytics platform. Over the past 2 years, our usage of Azure Data Lake as a reporting source has continued to grow and far exceeds more traditional sources like MS SQL, Oracle, etc.
My recommendation obviously would depend on the application. But I think given the right requirements, IBM DB2 Big SQL is definitely a contender for a database platform. Especially when disparate data and multiple data stores are involved. I like the fact I can use the product to federate my data and make it look like it's all in one place. The engine is high performance and if you desire to use Hadoop, this could be your platform.
IBM DB2 is a solid service but hasn't seen much innovation over the past decade. It gets the job done and supports our IT operations across digital so it is fair.
IBM did a good job of supporting us during our evaluation and proof of concept. They were able to provide all necessary guidance, answer questions, help us architect it, etc. We were pleased with the support provided by the vendor. I will caveat and say this support was all before the sale, however, we have a ton of IBM products and they provide the same high level of support for all of them. I didn't see this being any different. I give IBM support two thumbs up!
Azure Data Lake Storage from a functionality perspective is a much easier solution to work with. It's implementation from Amazon EMR went smooth, and continued usage is definitely better. However, Amazon EMR was significantly cheaper overall between the high transaction fees and cost of storage due to growth. The two both have their advantages and disadvantages, but the functionality of Azure Data Lake Storage outweighed it's cost
MS SQL Server was ruled out given we didn't feel we could collapse environments. We thought of MS-SQL as more of a one for one replacement for Sybase ASE, i.e., server for server. SAP HANA was evaluated and given a big thumbs up but was rejected because the SQL would have to be rewritten at the time (now they have an accelerator so you don't have to). Also, there was a very low adoption rate within the enterprise. IBM DB2 Big SQL was not selected even though technically it achieved high scores, because we could not find readily available talent and low adoption rate within the enterprise (basically no adoption at the time). We ended up selecting Exadata because of the high adoption rate within the enterprise even though technically HANA and Big SQL were superior in our evaluations.
Instead of having separate pools of storage for data we are now operating on a single layer platform which has cut down on time spent on maintaining those separate pools.
We have had more of an ROI with the scalability as we are able to control costs of storage when need be.
We are able to operate in a more streamlined approach as we are able to stay within the Azure suite of products and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the applications in our cloud-based infrastructure