We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"The most valuable features for database management in SQL Server are SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio Code with its administration capabilities."
"We have found the solution to be scalable."
"The fact that SQL Server fully integrates within the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a plus."
"The performance is great."
"It's a flexible solution."
"It's much more friendly in comparison with Oracle."
"The latest version supports for big data analytics. SQL Server's vector processing-based batch execution mode is now available to the entire execution of R or Python code. Since much of the work that tends to be done in R and Python involves aggregation, batch mode - which processes rows of data several at a time, can be very helpful."
"SQL Server is quite stable. And now we are using the Lattice 2017 version."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"The stored procedure integration with our development could be better. Things are always changing very fast at Microsoft, and it takes a lot of resources to get on top of it. We're struggling with version control. In terms of new features, we don't have any feature requests. We are not focusing on the database."
"The interface integration could be better."
"The pricing of the product could be better."
"The solution could offer better integration with other solutions - specifically Microsoft."
"The way SQL Server pivots data could be improved. For example, I would like built-in comma-separated pivot and unpivot functions."
"It's difficult to make changes. It's a very complicated product in general — that's the issue."
"I would like to see native plugins built for other platforms versus having to buy third-party plugins to tap into S3 buckets and AWS Cloud. Right now, it does not have those built-in plugins."
"I would like to see more integration with other products and it needs to be more secure."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and QlikView.
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