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 feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format."
"The performance is most important to me, and it helps our ability to make business decisions quickly."
"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."
"Distribution concurrency control."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server is a cost-effective solution."
"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 most valuable features of the IBM Netezza Performance Server are the NPS server because of the reduced maintenance and overall good performance."
"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."
"They are available on the Cloud, and the platform is very intuitive."
"Synapse Analytics' best features are notebooks, pipelines, and monitoring."
"Very interactive and provides flexibility."
"The solution operates like a typical SQL Server environment so there is no alienation in terms of technical knowledge."
"I have not used the technical support from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, but I worked with the developers at Microsoft who were top-notch."
"It's quite quick for querying, even with large datasets, and it's scalable. It's also flexible to use, so it's easy to update and get data quickly without wasting time."
"The MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture helps to make things a lot faster."
"The main advantage of using this solution is its ability to scale and handle very large amounts of data, in the petabyte range."
"Concurrency limit needs to be increased somewhat."
"IBM Netezza Performance Server could improve its interface, support for big data, and APA-based connectivity should be available."
"The scalability is not as expected. The capacity in the black box is not enough."
"In terms of features that I would like to see, one is the ability to actually scale out an architecture. Right now, if you buy one, it's fixed. There is no scale-up availability at all."
"LIke Teradata, we can’t add a node/SPU to the existing appliance."
"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."
"Oracle Exadata's security features, like TDE encryption, are missing in IBM Netezza Performance Server."
"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."
"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."
"We'd like the solution to have more analytics capability."
"Integration with other products is an area that can be improved."
"Microsoft should develop an interface to make it easier to shift from on-premise to the cloud."
"The initial setup has a bit of a learning curve."
"The only issue that we have run into with the solutions performance is with regards to concurrency."
"The linked services can be improved. We can create dynamic linked services to access a lot of databases but only those of the same type. For example, I can use the same linked services to access 11 SQL databases. However, if I have 11 SQL databases and five Oracle databases, I need two dynamic linked services. I cannot do it with only one linked service. The UI also needs to be improved. When I have used Azure Synapse for programming with PySpark, Scala, or .NET, for example, the UI has been unstable. If I open two notebooks for programming, one notebook will queue the session of the other."
"Unfortunately, we have had some issues with the dashboard reporting. Sometimes, the data for specific periods would just appear blank on the dashboard. To investigate this, we worked with a Microsoft incident agent and it turned out to be a result of bugs in the platform when dealing with specific types of queries in Azure Data Factory."
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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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