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IBM Informix vs. Vertica Analytics Database

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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

    Vertica Analytics Database

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AThe Vertica Analytics Platform supplies enterprise data warehouses with big data analytics capabilities and modernization. Vertica was acquired and supported by OpenText, then sold to Rocket Software in 2026.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM InformixVertica Analytics Database
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM InformixVertica Analytics Database
    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
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InformixVertica Analytics Database
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
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    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    SAP Datasphere
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InformixVertica Analytics Database
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (7 ratings)
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.9
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InformixVertica Analytics Database
    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
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    Rocket Software
    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
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    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
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    Rocket Software
    • 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
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    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
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    Rocket Software
    • 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
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    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    Informix is the best RDBMS on the market. Period.
    Incentivized
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    Rocket Software
    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
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    Rocket Software
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    IBM
    The Informix product support team has won awards and is appreciated by the entire Informix user community.
    Incentivized
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    Rocket Software
    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
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    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.
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    Rocket Software
    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
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    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
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    Rocket Software
    • 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
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