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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Informix

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AInformix is an embedded relational database offering from IBM.N/A

    Amazon Redshift

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.

    $0.24

    per GB per month

    Pricing
    IBM InformixAmazon Redshift
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Redshift Managed Storage
    $0.24
    per GB per month
    Current Generation
    $0.25 - $13.04
    per hour
    Previous Generation
    $0.25 - $4.08
    per hour
    Redshift Spectrum
    $5.00
    per terabyte of data scanned
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM InformixAmazon Redshift
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM InformixAmazon Redshift
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    78%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    82%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    78%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InformixAmazon Redshift
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InformixAmazon Redshift
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (7 ratings)
    9.0
    (38 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (10 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InformixAmazon Redshift
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    IBM
    • 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.
    • The latest release, v15.0, removes nearly all internal limits. Informix now supports database sizes up to 0.5 Yottabytes!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • [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
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    Informix is the best RDBMS on the market. Period.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    IBM
    Server management is easy enough to be able to embed the engine in a device and let it run for years without maintenance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    IBM
    The Informix product support team has won awards and is appreciated by the entire Informix user community.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    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.
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • 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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • 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
    Read full review
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