IBM Informix vs. OpenText Vertica vs. PostgreSQL

IBM Informix creates an effective and secure channel for easy and quick data management and transfer across other major Cloud platforms and other data storage systems. The analytical ability is also the best and most effective visual functionalities and the encryption and the data archiving functionalities are great and easy on reporting.

Incentivized

Vertica as a data warehouse to deliver analytics in-house and even to your client base on scale is not rivaled anywhere in the market. Frankly, in my experience it is not even close to equaled. Because it is such a powerful data warehouse, some people attempt to use it as a transactional database. It certainly is not one of those. Individual row inserts are slow and do not perform well. Deletes are a whole other story. RDBMS it is definitely not. OLAP it rocks.

Incentivized

PostgreSQL is best used for structured data, and best when following relational database design principles. I would not use PostgreSQL for large unstructured data such as video, images, sound files, xml documents, web-pages, especially if these files have their own highly variable, internal structure.

Incentivized

• Industry leading OLTP performance.
• Excellent Data Warehouse performance from the basic engine. Outstanding Data Warehouse performance from the Informix Warehouse Accelerator module.
• Best embedability among major RDBMS systems.
• Scalable from the smallest Raspberry PI up to the largest monolithic systems and out to dozens of distributed nodes.
• Hybrid data capabilities to merge relational data with time seriesv, geospacial data, JSON data and other non-traditional data types with performance comparable or better than systems dedicated to those data types.

Incentivized

• Extremely fast query performance - Vertica is one of the fastest query engines out there.
• Scales to TBs - Scales reasonably well up to 10-20 nodes and 10 - 100s of TB of data.
• Easy to Use - Fairly easy to user, we made quite some headway with just 1 person running it for a while.

Incentivized

• It works well with external data sources and runs on platforms with stable performance.
• Clients can rest assured that their personal information will be safe and secure.
• Many forums discuss setup and usage, and most are free.
• Adding tooling applications to a computer is unlimited.
• PostgreSQL runs on many OS platforms and supports ANSI SQL, stored procedures, and triggers.

• It is very difficult to find a missing functionality in Informix, technically is great. I will again criticize the business side and how it has been managed over the past, I hope this could be improved with HCL's help. I know they are working hard, but we need to start letting the world know and revert their concept about its existence and that it is one of the best competitors within the data treatment, in the market. We need to start telling the world about success cases and stories showing this and backing up its strong technology.

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• Could use some work on better integrating with cloud providers and open source technologies. For AWS you will find an AMI in the marketplace and recently a connector for loading data from S3 directly was created. With last release, integration with Kafka was added that can help.
• Managing large workloads (concurrent queries) is a bit challenging.
• Having a way to provide an estimate on the duration for currently executing queries / etc. can be helpful. Vertica provides some counters for the query execution engine that are helpful but some may find confusing.
• Unloading data over JDBC is very slow. We've had to come up with alternatives based on vsql, etc. Not a very clean, official on how to unload data.

Incentivized

• Clearer indications on what is the query plan, to optimize the query
• More out of the box, Postgres specific, SQL functions
• It would be nice to have a more visual aid of the relationship between all tables, but possibly this depend more on the UI used

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Informix is the best RDBMS on the market. Period.

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As a needed software for day to day development activities

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Server management is easy enough to be able to embed the engine in a device and let it run for years without maintenance.

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Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis.

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PostgreSQL's availability is top notch. Apart from connection time-out for an idle user, the database is super reliable.

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The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement.

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The Informix product support team has won awards and is appreciated by the entire Informix user community.

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I haven't had any recent opportunity to reach out to Vertica support. From what I remember, I believe whenever I reached out to them the experience was smooth.

Incentivized

There are several companies that you can contract for technical support, like EnterpriseDB or Percona, both first level in expertise and commitment to the software.

But we do not have contracts with them, we have done all the way from googling to forums, and never have a problem that we cannot resolve or pass around. And for dozens of projects and more than 15 years now.

Incentivized

The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point.

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The online documentation of the PostgreSQL product is elaborate and takes users step by step.

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IBM Informix creates effective solutions for big data extraction and data transportation functionalities across the entire Cloud services and the Automation ability is the best. The security that IBM Informix provides for all our business data and other project information and contacts is effective and the reports are very clean and easy to understand.

Vertica performs well when the query has good stats and is tuned well. Options for GUI clients are ugly and outdated. IO optimized: it's a columnar store with no indexing structures to maintain like traditional databases. The indexing is achieved by storing the data sorted on disk, which itself is run transparently as a background process.

Incentivized

Although the competition between the different databases is increasingly aggressive in the sense that they provide many improvements, new functionalities, compatibility with complementary components or environments, in some cases it requires that it be followed within the same family of applications that performs the company that develops it and that is not all bad, but being able to adapt or configure different programs, applications or other environments developed by third parties apart is what gives PostgreSQL a certain advantage and this diversification in the components that can be joined with it, is the reason why it is a great option to choose.

Incentivized

The DB is reliable, scalable, easy to use and resolves most DB needs

Incentivized

• Although I do not own nor have visibility on my company's figures:
• Informix generates consistent savings on DBA staffing, no need for many DBAs as other DBMS require.
• The replication architecture allowed consistent savings in the infrastructure as well as developments and maintenance, the job is already done, no need to develop complex and costly solutions, it's just a matter of configuring it.
• The advantages of hybrid development (i.e mixing SQL and NoSQL in the same database) is not just a marketing hype: it allowed us to solve with a brilliant solution, in one afternoon of coding, a functional problem we have been having for more than 10 years!
• The biggest drawback is that IBM pricing may be constraining, it has too important gaps between the mid range and highrange in terms of pricing

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• Positive impact on ROI by being able to get customer insights in real-time.
• Positive ROI through reduced time to set-up and maintain Vertica instances.

Incentivized

• Easy to administer so our DevOps team has only ever used minimal time to setup, tune, and maintain.
• Easy to interface with so our Engineering team has only ever used minimal time to query or modify the database. Getting the data is straightforward, what we do with it is the bigger concern.
• It's free. You can't beat that.

Incentivized