Databricks in San Francisco offers the Databricks Lakehouse Platform (formerly the Unified Analytics Platform), a data science platform and Apache Spark cluster manager. The Databricks Unified Data Service aims to provide a reliable and scalable platform for data pipelines, data lakes, and data platforms. Users can manage full data journey, to ingest, process, store, and expose data throughout an organization. Its Data Science Workspace is a collaborative environment for practitioners to run…
$0.07
Per DBU
IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
Medium to Large data throughput shops will benefit the most from Databricks Spark processing. Smaller use cases may find the barrier to entry a bit too high for casual use cases. Some of the overhead to kicking off a Spark compute job can actually lead to your workloads taking longer, but past a certain point the performance returns cannot be beat.
With the help of IBM Cognos, the sales division can analyze sales performance, sales trends in top-performing areas, etc. It also helps in financial planning, like forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and variance analysis. It also helps increase supply chain performance by analyzing it. It should be easy to use for small-scale data analysis. MS Excel is very useful for small-scale data analysis.
Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.
in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
The most important differentiating factor for Databricks Lakehouse Platform from these other platforms is support for ACID transactions and the time travel feature. Also, native integration with managed MLflow is a plus. EMR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks are not as optimized when it comes to Spark Job Execution. Other platforms need to be self-managed, which is another huge hassle.
Cognos Analytics provides wide range for reporting, data visualization, and self service analytics. Cognos has strong security and governance features. Sigma Computing is purely cloud native approach and has spreadsheet like interface and doesn't provide many customization options for reporting and dashboards. Cognos can smoothly integrate with IBM products and other third party data sources whereas Sigma Computing provides integration with cloud data warehouses and data lakes
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.