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."Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"The stability is fine, especially if you're hosting it on AWS or Azure. You can get up to 99.99% stability on AWS."
"Tuning Advisor suggests where to add indexes and from where to remove them. It works like an adviser."
"The most valuable feature would most likely be querying. We query a lot, we use a lot of stored procedures. As for other features, such as replication and all other more fancy features we don't use them the most. I do not know, but perhaps the DBAs would be the best people who know of the features that they use, but as far as how I use it, it's just for querying and running stored procedures. We use the bare minimum features."
"SQL Server Profiler makes finding and debugging easy."
"The most valuable feature is replication because we had several replicas of the SQL Server database in different geographical locations."
"SQL is very easy to manage."
"The scalability of the product is great."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"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."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"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 solution is lacking a compound index for comparing values."
"Performance could be improved."
"Its support for JSON should be improved. It does support JSON, but the support is not good enough currently. They should also improve the way indexes work. Its performance can also be improved because sometimes it becomes very slow for certain table designs. It cannot have more than a certain amount of data. As compared to other databases, its capability to handle large volumes of data is not very good."
"As SQL server could not support the number of connections we desired, we were forced to go with Oracle."
"It would be nice if they can reduce its price."
"Our biggest problem with SQL Server is latency. The communication between the cloud and the on-premises environment is slow. The data needs to be encrypted for security, and you have to exchange data certificates between environments. You can adjust the configuration to improve performance, but it would be nice if SQL Server had some templates to resolve problems."
"If SQL Server could perhaps run on Linux, that would be good. Most of us prefer Linux and I've used a lot of Linux. I understand that SQL Server is quite powerful, but I'm not sure if the functionality is there, but if it could be used in an open-source type of environment, it would be very good."
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 IBM Planning Analytics, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and SAP SQL Anywhere.
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