IBM Watson Studio on Cloud Pak for Data vs. Amazon Redshift

It has a lot of features that are good for teams working on large-scale projects and continuously developing and reiterating their data project models. Really helpful when dealing with large data. It is a kind of one-stop solution for all data science tasks like visualization, cleaning, analyzing data, and developing models but small teams might find a lot of features unuseful.

Incentivized

If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)

Incentivized

• Integration of IBM Watson APIs such as speech to text, image recognition, personality insights, etc.
• SPSS modeler and neural network model provide no-code environments for data scientists to build pipelines quickly.
• Enforced best-practices set up POCs for deployment in production with a minimum of re-work.
• Estimator validation lets data scientists test and prove different models.

Incentivized

• [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
• [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
• [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
• [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.

Incentivized

• The cost is steep and so only companies with resources can afford it
• It will be nice to have Chinese versions so that Chinese engineers can also use it easily
• It takes a while to learn how to input different kinds of skin defects for detection

Incentivized

• We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
• Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
• Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.

Incentivized

because we find out that DSX results have improved our approach to the whole subject (data, models, procedures)

Incentivized

The UI flawlessly merges this offering by providing a neat, minimal, responsive interface

Incentivized

Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.

Incentivized

From time to time there are services unavailable, but we have been always informed before and they got back to work sooner than expected

Incentivized

Never had slow response even on our very busy network

Incentivized

I received answers mostly at once and got answered even further my question: they gave me interesting points of view and suggestion for deepening in the learning path

Incentivized

The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support

Incentivized

The trainers on the job are very smart with solutions and very able in teaching

Incentivized

The Platform is very handy and suggests further steps according my previous interests

Incentivized

It surprised us with unpredictable case of use and brand new points of view

Incentivized

The main reason I personally changed over from Azure ML Studio is because it lacked any support for significant custom modelling with packages and services such as TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit and Spark ML. IBM Watson Studio provides these services and does so in a well integrated and easy to use fashion making it a preferable service over the other services that I have personally used.

Incentivized

Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.

Incentivized

Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.

Incentivized

It helped us in getting from 0 to DSX without getting lost

Incentivized

• Could instantly show data driven insights to drive 20% incremental revenue over existing results
• Still don't have a real use case for unstructured data like twitter feed
• Some of the insights around user actions have driven new projects to automate mundane tasks

Incentivized

• Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
• Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
• Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.

Incentivized