Every product has room for improvement. This is one of the most important things that comes to mind about IBM and their mind set when it comes to managing customers using dashDB.

As a fully managed cloud service, the day-to-day backend of maintaining dashDB is taken care of for you. This is not only limited to whatever fix packs may or may not be applied (these actually become irrelevant because you never know that that they have occurred until you read the tech docs), but also the versioning.

With dashDB, IBM engineers and developers are continuously building new functionality, compatibility and integrations into the product and for you; this happens automatically

We have been facing some challenges with Db2 when scaling up the operations in terms of availability. It becomes a single point of failure and it pollutes the whole system, leaving us challenges in serving the traffic. This is the reason that we are considering migrating to Oracle.

The support channels need to improve. Also the documentation is a bit light.

I would like to see improvements in backup and authentication.

It needs the ability to increase the number of retained backups to more than 2 days. This is a limitation. Also, the ability to connect an AD namespace to the login of dashDB is a missing feature.

One of the biggest advantage of cloud computing is Auto-scaling. AWS Redshift allows you to add more storage and CPUs/instances without any significant downtime.

With dashDB, scalability and uptime need more improvement. dashDB is not auto-scalable as of now. For any addition of space or computing power, we have to raise a request and there is a downtime to upgrade the instance.

The pay-as-you-go model is missing. You must buy a minimum instance of CPU and storage to begin with.

Right now, we are implementing on ESX VMware 6.0. Support for this platform is poor. Also, one of the backup/recovery options is broken and IBM is not addressing the issue.