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 main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"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."
"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."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"It is an extremely stable solution."
"The pricing of the solution is okay. It's less expensive than Oracle, for example."
"The replication feature, user interface, reporting services, and notification services are really good. They are providing SQL profiler and SQLCMD as their integrated software, so we don't find it difficult to integrate any of our third-party applications with MS SQL because all of them support MS SQL very clearly."
"The documentation and manuals are very good."
"It's a very capable, efficient, price-performant OLAP server."
"Agent service is a good feature of SQL Server, where you can schedule certain tasks."
"SQL Server is a highly stable solution."
"I love SQL Server's Common Table Expression. In addition to that, I like its lead and lag functions. That helped us reduce a lot of code when comparing rows in SQL Server."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"From a DB administrator perspective, I would like to see more space requirements and space capacity history, so that we are able to see which DBs are growing, and by how much per day or week."
"It's difficult to make changes. It's a very complicated product in general — that's the issue."
"They could improve the solution by allowing more portability between on-premise and the cloud."
"The performance could improve."
"The solution is expensive. The licensing costs are high."
"I would like to see the database become fully automated."
"The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on."
"There are certain shortcomings in the scalability of the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
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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