DB2 is a family of relational database software solutions offered by IBM. It includes standard Db2 and Db2 Warehouse editions, either deployable on-cloud, or on-premise.
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Amazon Redshift
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
I have primarily used it as the basis for a SIS - but I have migrated more than a few systems from there database systems to DB2 (Filemaker, MySQL, etc.). DB2 does have a better structural approach, as opposed to Filemaker, which allows for more data consistency, but this can also lead to an inflexibility that can sometimes be counterintuitive when attempting to compensate for the flexibility of the work environment as Schools tend to have an all in one approach.
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
DB2 maintains itself very well. The Task Scheduler component of DB2 allows for statistics gathering and reorganization of indexes and tables without user interaction or without specific knowledge of cron or Windows Task Scheduler / Scheduled jobs.
Its use of ASYNC, NEARSYNC, and SYNC HADR (High Availability Disaster Recovery ) models gives you a range of options for maintaining a very high uptime ratio. Failover from PRIMARY to SECONDARY becomes very easy with just a single command or windowed mouse click.
Task Scheduler ( DB2 9.7 and earlier ) allows for jobs to be run within other jobs, and exit and error codes can define what other jobs are run. This allows for ease of maintenance without third party softwares.
Tablespace usage and automatic storage help keep your data segmented while at rest, making partitioning easier.
Ability to run commands via CLI (Command Line Interface) or via Control Center / Data Studio ( DB2 10.x+) makes administration a breeze.
Redshift is fully managed. Small teams do not have the resources to maintain a cluster. CloudWatch metrics are provided out-of-the-box, and it is easy to configure alarms.
Redshift's console allows you to easily inspect and manage queries, and manage the performance of the cluster.
Redshift is ubiquitous; many products (e.g., ETL services) integrate with it out-of-the-box.
Writing .csvs to S3 and querying them through Redshift Spectrum is convenient.
It could benefit from adding data integrity and programming tools common to other database management systems.
Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2. That version of PostgreSQL was released in December 2006. While PostgreSQL was much improved since then, the new features were not implemented in Redshift. Many basic features are missing from it.
Primary keys can be declared but not enforced. Referential integrity (foreign keys) can be declared but not enforced. UNIQUE and CHECK constraints are not supported and cannot be declared.
IDENTITY can be declared on a column, and Redshift will put unique values into it. However: IDENTITY values in the newly inserted rows won’t be incremental or sequential. To implement a sequential number, you need to write your own custom code.
There are no stored procedures in Redshift. We are writing SQL script files, and then parsing and running them one statement at a time from a Python program. This also enabled us to implement execution-time error logging.
In SQL scripts, to check for the row count of affected rows, a complicated join query against some system tables or views has to be executed.
Data Control Language (DCL) does not exist. No statements like IF, WHILE, DO, RAISERROR, etc.
On performance of views… Views do not “pass-through” a query parameter which is a potential problem for performance.
When selecting against a view with the WHERE clause outside of the view, the inner query of the view will be executed first without consideration for the WHERE clause, and only then the WHERE clause will be applied.
Certain clauses of SQL work many times faster than other clauses. So be careful and test your statements for performance earlier rather than later, especially if working with a large data set.
There was a situation when DELETE FROM JOIN was unacceptably slow. Replacing JOIN with the USING clause made DELETE instantaneous.
The DB2 database is a solid option for our school. We have been on this journey now for 3-4 years so we are still adapting to what it can do. We will renew our use of DB2 because we don’t see. Major need to change. Also, changing a main database in a school environment is a major project, so we’ll avoid that if possible.
You have to be well versed in using the technology, not only from a GUI interface but from a command line interface to successfully use this software to its fullest.
Overall it serves all our aspects of data management like data cleaning, data manipulation, and data reporting on the cloud platform. We can create stored procedures and triggers in it very easily as all the options are self suggested in it. We can easily attach the results of ARS to the other tools as well for drawing the statistical results.
I have never had DB2 go down unexpectedly. It just works solidly every day. When I look at the logs, sometimes DB2 has figured out there was a need to build an index. Instead of waiting for me to do it, the database automatically created the index for me. At my current company, we have had zero issues for the past 8 years. We have upgrade the server 3 times and upgraded the OS each time and the only thing we saw was that DB2 got better and faster. It is simply amazing.
The performances are exceptional if you take care to maintain the database. It is a very powerful tool and at the same time very easy to use. In our installation, we expect a DB machine on the mainframe with access to the database through ODBC connectors directly from branch servers, with fabulous end users experience.
Easily the best product support team. :) Whenever we have questions, they have answered those in a timely manner and we like how they go above and beyond to help.
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
With the other two mentioned above, I needed to have processes and frameworks that executed outside of the environment driving DB management operations. Yes, these are completely different solutions; however, the support you get for framework, library, and language support allows for runtime at a different layer than with other solutions.
We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014. Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure. Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a data store. [Amazon] Redshift was ideal with the price structure, performance and ROI[.]
DB2 can be configured and can work with a variety of applications as opposed to how it was designed initially to only with with IBM mainframes. It's easy implementation process makes it a good buy for many organizations to scale their applications to be the best in terms of versatility, resilience and application performance
