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 three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The most valuable features are ease of use and the integration with Single Sign On (SSO), as well as with other Microsoft products."
"It is a pretty good solution. The on-premise version 2019 has many features, and they had introduced a really good and stable environment in version 2019. It has very good integration with big data clusters and other things. It covers pretty much everything that you can do with a SQL server. You can use any language to connect to it, which is not there in other solutions. They have also introduced Python, and it also has ArcScale. PaaS is a modern, scalable database. You can use Power Automate and a lot of features in this. It is very easy, and you don't have to worry about versions and upgrades. Microsoft keeps on adding new features to this solution. Microsoft is improving its connectivity on an ongoing basis. It connects well with Office 365. If you see something not working, in a couple of weeks, it is going to work because there is a team working on it. You can vote for the things that are missing, and Microsoft can work on them depending on the product that they're launching."
"It is quite reliable in cluster configurations and has helped me to reduce downtime and improve SLAs."
"The backups are excellent."
"The solution offers very high performance."
"I have found the most valuable features to be the flexibility and the vast amount of features available."
"Easy to implement and user-friendly relational database management system. This product is stable and scalable."
"A big advantage is the ability to store any type of data in SQL Server."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"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."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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 see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The solution could offer more integration with other platforms."
"Performance could be improved."
"The performance needs some improvement and it needs more features integrated into it."
"SQL Server doesn't have proper bitmap indexing, proper columnar databases, or proper implementation of materialized views."
"The documentation could be much better. It's lacking right now. If there are better help pages, for even complicated queries and stuff like that that would be quite a help for users."
"SQL Server could improve by being more user-friendly, it is still geared towards specialists. Additionally, the monitoring system is difficult to use, not everyone can use it well. The configuration should be able to be done through the GUI."
"If you are a new user then this solution could be difficult, they could improve by making the overall usage easier."
"In the next release, I would like to see a better user interface and a familiar syntax."
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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