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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SingleStore
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
SingleStore aims to enable organizations to scale from one to one million customers, handling SQL, JSON, full text and vector workloads in one unified platform.
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.
Well-Suited Scenarios: Real-Time Analytics: Financial trading platforms requiring instant insights. Operational Dashboards: Retail businesses monitoring live sales. IoT Data Processing: Smart device monitoring with high data ingestion. Fraud Detection: Banks detect suspicious transactions instantly. Less Appropriate Scenarios: Archival Storage: Cold data storage with infrequent access. Low-Volume Workloads: Small-scale apps with minimal data processing needs. Complex ETL Pipelines: Heavy data transformations without real-time demands.
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.
It does not release a patch to have back porting; it just releases a new version and stops support; it's difficult to keep up to that pace.
Support engineers lack expertise, but they seem to be improving organically.
Lacks enterprise CDC capability: Change data capture (CDC) is a process that tracks and records changes made to data in a database and then delivers those changes to other systems in real time.
For enterprise-level backup & restore capability, we had to implement our model via Velero snapshot backup.
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.
[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.
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.
When it comes to ingestion speed, SingleStore is probably at the top. Being able to create pipelines using SQL to ingest data from S3, Kafka, and other sources, is a great advantages. This means you can dynamically ingest data by customizing your SQL queries. SingleStore pipelines are pretty sophisticated, yet very simple. Few lines of codes and you are ingesting data, while still able to perform analytical queries on your billions of row tables.
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 deep dives into our most complexed queries and bizarre issues that sometimes only we get comparing to other clients. Our special workload (thousands of Kafka pipelines + high concurrency of queries). The response match to the priority of the request, P1 gets immediate return call. Missing features are treated, they become a client request and being added to the roadmap after internal consideration on all client needs and priority. Bugs are patched quite fast, depends on the impact and feasible temporary workarounds. There is no issue that we haven't got a proper answer, resolution or reasoning
We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
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.
Reduces database sprawl, ETL costs, infrastructure expenses, etc. Supports horizontal scaling, unlike PostgreSQL & Aurora, and real-time analytics and fast transactions (HTAP), unlike Snowflake & ClickHouse.Handles high-volume workloads with thousands of concurrent queries. No need for ETL processes, unlike BigQuery & Snowflake. Works with JSON, relational, and key-value data, unlike ClickHouse.
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
Lower operational complexity - Installation and maintenance is pretty easy
Object scale when used can compete with Traditional Warehouse Systems like Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum
Adds lot of value to the business like couple of operations which never worked in traditional DBMS including HANA, Oracle In Memory, SQL Server In Memory just flew in SingleStore
