DB2 is a family of relational database software solutions offered by IBM. It includes standard Db2 and Db2 Warehouse editions, either deployable on-cloud, or on-premise.
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Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
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.
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
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.
It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
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.
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
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.
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
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.
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
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.
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
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.
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
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.
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
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 withsmall 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 insmall bursts many times a day!!
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
Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
There are some significant setup for the server product.
Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.
