SQL Server vs Teradata vs Vertica comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SQL Server, Teradata, and Vertica based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools.
To learn more, read our detailed Relational Databases Tools Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"SQL Server is similar to other Microsoft products, such as BI, they are easy to use. You do not need to have an expensive BD to maintain them. All the useful intuitive features you find in Microsoft solutions you will find in SQL Server.""The product can scale if a company needs it to.""The main feature of this solution is ease of use.""We like business integration, database, and analysis.""The solution is very common. It's easy to use.""Since we can automate most of our tasks, it means that the management is very easy.""I like the availability group functionality. We are setting up more clusters using availability groups. The enterprise licensing or Software Assurance makes it a little bit cheaper as well. It is nice to have that read-only copy for reporting and everything else.""Very good security features."

More SQL Server Pros →

"Teradata features high productivity and reliability because it has several redundancy options, so the system is always up and running.""The functionality of the solution is excellent.""It has massive parallel processing ability to do large amounts of concurrent querying.""​Parallel processing features have helped to easily dump any size of data and retrieve data with great performance.""Things have started moving faster in my company, such as data retrieval happens more quickly.​""The initial setup was straightforward.""It handles large amounts of information with a linear performance increase, in relation to a HW investment.""A conventional and easily defined way to build a data warehouse or a layer of data marts."

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"The extensibility and efficiency provided by their C++ SDK.""We are able to integrate our Vertica data warehouse with Tableau to create numerous reports quickly and efficiently.""I enjoy the cybersecurity and backup features.""Initiate on one node, and the RPM propagates automatically to all other nodes. ​""Eighty percent of the ETL operations have improved since implementing this solution.""I don't need any special hardware. I can use commodity hardware, which is nice to have in a commercial solution.""I appreciate the flexibility offered by Vertica's projections. It allows for modifying the primary projection without altering the tables, which helps to optimize queries without the need to modify the underlying data.""The solution is quick, has good compression data, and is not expensive."

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Cons
"There is room for improvement in performance when managing a large quality of data and a high number of active users.""While using it, we really didn't experience any pain points.""Something that could be improved is the cost because it's very high. That's the only thing I'm concerned about but the technology is good.""SQL Server could be improved with cheaper licensing because it's very expensive.""I would like to see better integration between their link server and other platforms, such as IBM.""The solution is rather expensive.""I would like to see native plugins built for other platforms versus having to buy third-party plugins to tap into S3 buckets and AWS Cloud. Right now, it does not have those built-in plugins.""The configuration process can be a little complex."

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"The current operational approach needs improvement.""I would like to see more integration with many different types of data.""Sometimes the large injestion takes days to load data, and some of our stored procedures take two to three days.""It could use some more advanced analytics relating to structured and semi-structured data.""An additional feature I would you like to see included in the next release, is that it needs to be more cloud-friendly.""It needs a teaching web site with more training on third-party tools used for BI.""Teradata's UI could be improved.""Teradata's pricing is quite high compared to Redshift, Synapse, or GCP alternatives."

More Teradata Cons →

"Limitations in group by projections is where I would like to see an improvement.""I would personally like to see extended developer tooling suited to Vertica – think published PowerDesigner SQL dialect support.""Promotion/marketing must be improved, even though it is a very useful product at very good price, it is not as "popular" as it should be.""When it is about to reach the maximum storage capacity, it becomes slow.""Suboptimal projection design causes queries to not scale linearly.""Metadata for database files scale okay, but metadata related to tables/columns/sequences must be stored on all nodes.""Whatever's out, the core is not always as great as the engine, especially their first version.""Some of our small to medium-sized customers would like to see containerization and flexibility from the deployment standpoint."

More Vertica Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The free version is cumbersome to use and maintain. But $5000 for a licence is more expense than the benefit I would get from a licensed version. A licence might be worth the price to simplify management and speed up searches."
  • "​We are a Microsoft shop, so we use Active Directory. That integrates well with this product, but we did look at Oracle. We also looked at IBM. This was the best price point for us for what we were getting.​"
  • "​It has the easiest licensing."
  • "This is a downside of enterprise Microsoft products."
  • "Currently, almost all of my machines are in Azure and I think it is the best way of licensing now (VM+software)."
  • "The price has been going higher and higher. The market is quite price sensitive."
  • "My advice is quite straightforward. If you know the number of users who really and truly need access to the Server then it is a no-brainer. If you do not know, then get the basic package and minimum licenses and start from there. Needless to say, users can develop/use data structures outside and then deploy onto the Server."
  • "The setup cost is high, but it will return every penny."
  • More SQL Server Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Teradata is not cheap, but you get what you pay for."
  • "Make sure you have the in-house skills to design and support the solution, as relying on external sources is extremely costly and tends to lock you into specific platforms, tools, and paradigms."
  • "In the past, it turned out that other solutions, in order to provide the full range of abilities that the Teradata platform provides plus the migration costs, would end up costing more than Teradata does."
  • "The initial cost may seem high, but the TCO is low."
  • "Teradata is currently making improvements in this area."
  • "It is still a very expensive solution. While I very much like the pure technological supremacy of the software itself, I believe Teradata as a company needs to become more affordable. They are already losing the market to more flexible or cheaper competitors."
  • "Teradata is expensive but gives value for money, especially if you don't want to move your data to the cloud."
  • "Price is quite high, so if it is really possible to use other solutions (e.g. you do not have strict requirements for performance and huge data volumes), it might be better to look at alternatives from the RDBMS world."
  • More Teradata Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Work with a vendor, if possible, and take advantage of more aggressive discounts at mid-fiscal year (April) and fiscal year-end (October).​"
  • "It's free up to three nodes and 1TB, and then get in contact with their sales guys."
  • "Start with license per 1TB. Starting from hundreds of TB there is unlimited licensing to be considered. Move historical data to HDFS/S3 which are significantly cheaper or even free."
  • "The first TB is free and you can use all the Vertica features. After 1TB you have to pay for licensing. The product is worth it, but be aware of this condition, and plan. The compression ratio is explained in the documentation."
  • "I think it's starting to get a little expensive. Open source products are starting to get more robust, so I think that's something that they need to start looking at in terms of licensing."
  • "Read the fine print carefully."
  • "It is fast to purchase through the AWS Marketplace."
  • "The pricing and licensing depend on the size of your environment and the zone where you want to implement."
  • More Vertica Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs… more »
    Top Answer:SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller… more »
    Top Answer:My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect… more »
    Top Answer: I have spoken to my colleagues about this comparison and in our collective opinion, the reason why some people may… more »
    Top Answer: Before my organization implemented this solution, we researched which big brands were using Teradata, so we knew if it… more »
    Top Answer:Teradata is not a difficult product to work with, especially since they offer you technical support at all levels if you… more »
    Top Answer:The product's initial setup phase is extremely simple.
    Top Answer:In my opinion, nothing needs improvement in the solution as it is a great product. The documentation of Vertica is an… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    33,485
    Comparisons
    25,100
    Reviews
    26
    Average Words per Review
    361
    Rating
    8.6
    Views
    5,818
    Comparisons
    4,861
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    451
    Rating
    8.1
    4th
    out of 33 in Data Warehouse
    Views
    4,414
    Comparisons
    3,480
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    353
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
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    Compared 7% of the time.
    IBM Db2 Database logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Snowflake logo
    Compared 18% of the time.
    Amazon Redshift logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Oracle Exadata logo
    Compared 6% of the time.
    BigQuery logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Oracle Database logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Also Known As
    Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL
    Micro Focus Vertica, HPE Vertica, HPE Vertica on Demand
    Learn More
    Overview

    SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.

    The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.

    The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:

    • SQL Server Developer
    • SQL Server Expression
    • SQL Server Standard 
    • SQL Server Enterprise

    The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.

    The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:

    • Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.

    • Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.

    • Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.

    • String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.

    • System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.

    SQL Server Services

    SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:

    • Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
       
    • Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.

    • Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication. 

    • Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.

    • Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.

    • Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.

    • Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.

    • Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.

    • Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.

    • Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.

    SQL Server Benefits

    The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:

    • The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.

    • Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.

    • The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.

    • SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.

    • The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.

    • SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.

    • The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.

    Reviews from Real Users

    A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature

    Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.

    Teradata is a multi-cloud data platform company that provides data warehouse and relational database tools. The brand has an extensive portfolio of big data analytic solutions, integrated marketing applications, and services. The products that Teradata offers can be categorized in the following ways:

    • Software: The products in this category include Teradata Vantage, an advanced SQL engine and Teradata database.

    • Cloud: The solutions can work with popular cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and VMware. Teradata Cloud and customer cloud are also included in this product category.

    • Ecosystem management: The products in this section include IntelliSphere, business continuity manager, data lab, data mover, data stream, QueryGrid, and viewpoint.

    • Hardware: This category includes backup, archive, and restore (BAR) and IntelliFlex.

    • Applications: Master data management (MDM) and Teradata analytics for enterprise applications are the two products in this category.

    One of the most popular and commonly used products by Teradata is Teradata Vantage. This is a connected multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics. The product unifies data lakes, analytics, and data warehouses, as well as data sources and types. The solution offers its customers scalability, which allows them to scale dimensions to handle massive workloads of data. Teradata Vantage utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power more models and enhance quality.

    Through Vantage Console, businesses can benefit from role-based, no-code software to organize and manage their data. The product offers deployment on many popular public clouds, on premises, and on commodity hardware. Teradata Vantage unifies and integrates all data types from sources and provides companies with a single source of information. It achieves this by supporting all common data types and formats. The product also provides organizations with tools for monitoring, analyzing, and connecting data throughout the organizations.

    Part of this product is also VantageCloud, which offers a modern cloud-native architecture as well as hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options. This solution offers new ways for clients to deploy their platforms. These include the next-generation, cloud-native architecture of Teradata VantageCloud Lake.

    Teradata Features

    The different products that Teradata offers have various features which facilitate data management for customers. Some of the key capabilities of the solutions offered by Teradata include:

    • Connectivity: Users can benefit from connections to the mainframe or network-attached systems. The product provides its own extension for interaction with data stored in the tables. It also supports SQL.

    • Linear scalability: Teradata solutions are highly scalable and linear. The solution can handle large volumes of data effectively while also supporting the ability to scale up to 2048 nodes.

    • Load and unload utilities: The product offers features to move data in and out of the product's system effectively.

    • Mature optimizer: Part of this feature is Teradata Optimizer, which is an advanced product that can handle up to 64 joins in a single query.

    • Robust utilities: The solution includes multiple robust utilities in this category of features that facilitate data handling in and out of the product's systems. The tools include MultiLoad, FastLoad, and FastExport.

    • Shared nothing architecture: This set of features, connected to the architecture of Teradata, is known as “shared nothing architecture” because the nodes, processors, and disks all work independently. These capacities ensure better value for a given task.

    • Unlimited parallelism: These features divide large volumes of data into smaller processes that are executed in parallel. This contributes to the execution of complex tasks in a timely manner.

    Teradata Benefits

    Through its multiple solutions, Teradata offers various benefits for its clients. Some of these include:

    • The solution facilitates prototype creation and offers faster times for completion.

    • Through Teradata, users are able to use faster, simpler, and easier solutions for data-related tasks.

    • The product eliminates the need for unnecessary data movement, which contributes to performance improvements.

    • Teradata offers developers the ability to decide where in the architecture different parts of an application run.

    • Teradata allows database administrators to manage databases from a single point of control.

    • The solution provides the option to get the same data on multiple deployment options.

    • The product supports Online Analytical Programming (OLAP) functions, which allows it to perform a complex analytical process of data.

    • Teradata uses the Service Workstation to provide a single operation view for the multi-node system of the product.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Martin P., a services manager at Bytes Systems Integration, describes Teradata as a product that is very fast with good database control and excellent support.

    Blaine V., principal at Insight Data Consulting, rates Teradata highly because of its excellent native features, highly stable, and impressive automation.

    Vertica is a deploy-anywhere SQL database created for elasticity, speed, and advanced analytics. Vertica enables today’s busy teams to modernize their data warehouses, democratize data and analytics to enable increased access, and deploy analytics in a hybrid cloud environment. Additionally, Vertica merges how companies power their analytics by providing a scalable, open, and elastic database with numerous intuitive features.

    In today’s marketplace, organizations are experiencing continued robust growth of data volumes, and citizen data scientists’ broader use of analytics is causing many companies to re-visit and re-examine their systems in order to match the demands of an aggressive marketplace. Analytics are continually swiftly evolving. New data from social media, blogs, IoT sources, data streams, gas and electrical grids, and mobile networks is being constantly gathered in extensive data sets. This presents organizations with a new opportunity to become more data driven, and they must be able to manage the new data growth and identify the trends and sequences that can lead to both improved business opportunities and continued repeat business from their clients.

    Vertica Benefits:

    Vertica has many valuable key benefits. Some of its most useful benefits include:

    • Efficiency:  Vertica provides robust compression and intuitive impressions. This results in users requiring significantly less storage and hardware than other comparable data analytics solutions. The progressive Vertica architecture results in queries that are 10-50 times faster than other platforms while providing more storage data per server.
    • Integration: Each new iteration of Vertica is tested and certified with the latest ETL and visualization tools. It actively supports Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), and popular SQL providers. All these solutions and most leading BI and visualization tools interact seamlessly, making Vertica overall a very cost-effective solution and solid business investment.
    • Cloud flexibility: With Vertica, users do not have to get locked into a single cloud vendor. Users are able to take complete advantage of the current infrastructure that is already in place. Vertica seamlessly integrates with popular public clouds, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, AWS, Alibaba, VMware clouds, and more. It also provides for easy portability across on-premise and multi-cloud environments and data lakes. Vertica designs a robust flexible platform for running a company’s analytical and computing workloads, which allows applications to run simultaneously on numerous environments in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Vertica is able to seamlessly use public clouds and private data centers, and it grants the flexibility to switch in an instant.
    • Security: Vertica offers dynamic end-to-end security with support for partner solutions and industry-standard protocols such as Apache Sentry, AWS IAM, Kerberos, LDAP, and more. Vertica utilizes an intuitive layered security model that provides multiple security authentication authorization mechanisms. Vertica will also maintain an audit trail, natively exported to other security domains for analysis and persistence. 

    Reviews from Real Users

    “I am using Vertica for aggregations and dashboards. The most valuable feature of Vertica is the ability to receive large aggregations at a very quick pace. The use case of subclusters is very good.” - Bijal S., Group Chief Technology Officer at Netcore Solutions

    “The hardware usage and speed has been the most valuable feature of this solution. It is very fast and has saved us a lot of money.” - Munkhsaikhan B.,  Project Lead - Digital Transformation Unit at Bodi Electronics LLC

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
    Netflix
    Cerner, Game Show Network Game, Guess by Marciano, Supercell, Etsy, Nascar, Empirix, adMarketplace, and Cardlytics.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Comms Service Provider5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization42%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider26%
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm26%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Media Company17%
    Marketing Services Firm14%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise39%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise48%
    Large Enterprise39%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise56%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise77%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise66%
    Buyer's Guide
    Relational Databases Tools
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.