We performed a comparison between IBM Netezza Performance Server and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features of the IBM Netezza Performance Server are the NPS server because of the reduced maintenance and overall good performance."
"The benefit is really because of the additional speed that we have and, truth be told, the more updated ETL processes and the revamped scheduler in general."
"The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format."
"The data governance prospect... from what I've seen, that is a really powerful tool as well, to help with data lineage and keeping track of that."
"The underlying hardware that IBM provides with this appliance is made for a specific purpose, to serve performance on a large amount of data, and to do analytics as well. It is faster, when you compare it to any other product."
"The performance is most important to me, and it helps our ability to make business decisions quickly."
"Distribution concurrency control."
"We are able to execute very complex queries. Over 90 percent of our query executions are one second or less. We do millions of queries everyday."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability."
"I like the keynotes and their simplicity. Like other Microsoft products, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is simple to understand and use."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and that it's easy to use as an end-user compared to AWS."
"The solution can scale."
"Synapse makes it easy to integrate and onboard data from other Microsoft and Azure sources. The interface is familiar because we were using Azure Data Factory before Synapse. It made the transition even easier because the Synapse interface is exactly the same."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics are its serverless flexibility and complete power have allowed me to explore various different use cases. While I am not an expert in the product, my experience in programming in Databricks has shown me that Microsoft's investments in Synapse could potentially lead to it becoming a complete replacement for Databricks in the future."
"What I found most valuable in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is that it's native only for Azure, so you get better performance and there's no issue. To explain further, many different types of data come, in particular, structured and unstructured data. For audit purposes, there's also unstructured data, so the most important aspect is that with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you have the capability of using both technologies, meaning that you can use or mix structured and unstructured data which is important. This can also be done in Hadoop, and on other platforms, so you have everything in one place. You don't have to worry about how to manage both structured and unstructured data and where to store information. With Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you can take care of everything, particularly in Azure. The solution also provides you with many features apart from analytics, for example, storage which makes it better."
"The most advantageous aspect of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is its simplified data transformation process compared to traditional databases. This makes data cleansing and transformation more manageable and straightforward, which we appreciate. It is much easier to build as well."
"The scalability is not as expected. The capacity in the black box is not enough."
"We are not able to scale. The only way to scale is to get another appliance, but we have a customers who would need us to hydrate the data between the two appliances, and Netezza does not do that."
"Our main problem with it is concurrency. When there are too many users running Netezza at the same time, this is when we have the most complaints."
"Concurrency limit needs to be increased somewhat."
"The only issue is that it's not expandable."
"LIke Teradata, we can’t add a node/SPU to the existing appliance."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server could improve its interface, support for big data, and APA-based connectivity should be available."
"Oracle Exadata's security features, like TDE encryption, are missing in IBM Netezza Performance Server."
"I'm not entirely happy with the billing model. I'm not entirely happy with how the enterprise services are pretty expensive, but that's about it."
"We'd, of course, always like to pay less for the service if we can."
"Comes with a pretty steep learning curve."
"The initial setup process needs improvement. When you're moving to the cloud it takes a bit of time. It would be great if they could implement something that would make it faster."
"It could be beneficial to focus on integration with various data sources and similar enhancements."
"Synapse makes it easy to integrate and onboard data from other Microsoft and Azure sources. The interface is familiar because we were using Azure Data Factory before Synapse. It made the transition even easier because the Synapse interface is exactly the same."
"The configuration for things like high-availability could be more user-friendly for non-technical users."
"The major challenge that we're seeing with Azure Synapse is around security concerns. The way it is working right now, it has Managed VNet by Microsoft option, similar to the implementation of Azure Databricks, which may pose a concern for financial institutions. For managed environments, the banks have very strict policies around data being onboarded to those environments. For some confidential applications, the banks have the policy to encrypt it with their own key, so it is sort of like Bring Your Own Key, but it is not possible to manage the resources with Microsoft or Databricks, which is probably the major challenge with Azure Synapse. There should be more compatibility with SQL Server. It should be easier to migrate solutions between different environments because right now, it is not really competitive. It is not like you can go and install SQL Database in some other environment. You will have to go through some migration projects, which probably is one of the major showstoppers for any bank. When they consider Synapse, they not only consider the investment in the actual service; they also consider the cost of the migration process. When you scale out or scale down your system, it becomes unavailable for a few minutes. Because it is a data warehouse environment, it is not such a huge deal, but it would be great if they can improve it so that the platform is available during the change of configuration."
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IBM Netezza Performance Server is ranked 10th in Data Warehouse with 33 reviews while Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 86 reviews. IBM Netezza Performance Server is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM Netezza Performance Server writes "A cost-effective data warehousing tool, but security features like TDE encryption are missing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "No competitors provide the entire solution to one place ". IBM Netezza Performance Server is most compared with Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database, Teradata, Snowflake and VMware Tanzu Data Services, whereas Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Azure Data Factory, SAP BW4HANA, Snowflake, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Teradata. See our IBM Netezza Performance Server vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics report.
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