We performed a comparison between Databricks and IBM Cognos based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms."We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time."
"The main features of the solution are efficiency."
"Can cut across the entire ecosystem of open source technology to give an extra level of getting the transformatory process of the data."
"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."
"Databricks' Lakehouse architecture has been most useful for us. The data governance has been absolutely efficient in between other kinds of solutions."
"The most valuable feature is the Spark cluster which is very fast for heavy loads, big data processing and Pi Spark."
"I like how easy it is to share your notebook with others. You can give people permission to read or edit. I think that's a great feature. You can also pull in code from GitHub pretty easily. I didn't use it that often, but I think that's a cool feature."
"Databricks has improved my organization by allowing us to transform data from sources to a different format and feed that to the analytics, business intelligence, and reporting teams. This tool makes it easy to do those kinds of things."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"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."
"If I want to create a Databricks account, I need to have a prior cloud account such as an AWS account or an Azure account. Only then can I create a Databricks account on the cloud. However, if they can make it so that I can still try Databricks even if I don't have a cloud account on AWS and Azure, it would be great. That is, it would be nice if it were possible to create a pseudo account and be provided with a free trial. It is very essential to creating a workforce on Databricks. For example, students or corporate staff can then explore and learn Databricks."
"The product should provide more advanced features in future releases."
"I'm not the guy that I'm working with Databricks on a daily basis. I'm on the management team. However, my team tells me there are limitations with streaming events. The connectors work with a small set of platforms. For example, we can work with Kafka, but if we want to move to an event-driven solution from AWS, we cannot do it. We cannot connect to all the streaming analytics platforms, so we are limited in choosing the best one."
"Anyone who doesn't know SQL may find the product difficult to work with."
"The stability of the clusters or the instances of Databricks would be better if it was a much more stable environment. We've had issues with crashes."
"We'd like a more visual dashboard for analysis It needs better UI."
"There should be better integration with other platforms."
"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."
"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."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while IBM Cognos is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Dremio, whereas IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion.
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