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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SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
SingleStore aims to deliver the world’s fastest distributed SQL database for data-intensive applications: SingleStoreDB, which combines transactional + analytical workloads in a single platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
