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IBM Netezza Performance Server vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Netezza Performance Server
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (11th), Hadoop (6th)
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Netezza Performance Server and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Netezza Performance Server is designed for Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 4.3%, up 4.2% compared to last year.
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 1.6% mindshare, up 1.0% since last year.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Netezza Performance Server4.3%
Teradata9.0%
Snowflake8.9%
Other77.8%
Data Warehouse
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise1.6%
SQL Server10.3%
Oracle Database10.3%
Other77.8%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Shiv Subramaniam Koduvayur - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at MAF Retail
Parallel data processing streamlines operations while cost and cloud integration challenge adoption
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only available in AWS, and in the Middle East, it is not well-developed in the Azure environment. For the cost to be reduced, it should match competitors. Many features need to be incorporated on the cloud.
reviewer2784705 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Advisor at a government with 10,001+ employees
Long term database experience has supported OLTP workloads and delivers reliable cross platform migrations
SAP is not putting money into modernizing SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. One of the things I discovered on the last project I was on was that they did not incorporate the Intel new instruction set in SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. Intel has augmented its instruction set referred to as new instructions. They did that to make conversion easier. When you migrate SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise cross-platform, you go through a process where it converts the character set. If you are going from AIX to Linux or from Solaris to Linux, Linux is referred to as Little Endian, while AIX or Solaris are considered Big Endian. This is determined by how the product stores data. The word size of these processors is 32 bits long. If you start numbering from the little end, it is referred to as Little Endian. If you start numbering from the big end, it is called Big Endian. To migrate a SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise database from a Big Endian setup like AIX or Solaris to migrate to a Big Endian setup on an Intel, the operating system determines whether it is Little Endian or Big Endian. When you migrate from Big Endian to Little Endian, the database has to go through a character set conversion, and some of these databases are quite large with gigabytes and gigabytes of data. They have to do a character set conversion to the existing database before they do anything else. The worst part is that you have to rebuild all the indexes when you do that. When you switch endianness of the database, you have to rebuild all the indexes. It will automatically do that for system tables, but for actual user databases, you have to rebuild all your indexes, and it takes a long time. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is a relational database and is the predecessor of Microsoft SQL Server. All that functionality that Microsoft SQL Server had came from essentially SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. The problem with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise these days is it is not expanding its place in the marketplace or expanding its position in the marketplace. A lot of companies have migrated away from SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. It works fairly well, but the problem is SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise was architected to be an OLTP engine and is now doing things for larger databases that were not in its original intended purpose. The endianness of the RDBMS is a major impediment to continuing to use SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. You have a multi-gigabyte database, and it will go through a conversion process in a single-threaded fashion, and then you have to rebuild the indexes. Rebuilding the indexes is lengthy and time-consuming. The part of the conversion process that is concerned with conversion of the character set is single-threaded. You may have eight cores on your machine or virtual machine and only one can be used in the conversion process. There is another problem with the whole thing in that it will sometimes not operate properly. Under certain workloads, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise will become overwhelmed. When you convert it, it does not operate properly in all circumstances. The root cause of that is that SAP in its desire to save money and desire to orphan the product has not recompiled or redeveloped the product to take advantage of the Intel new instruction set. Other relational databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server have the same issue to deal with, but with those platforms, they are taking advantage of the new instruction set. There are some additional Intel instruction sets or instructions in their Intel instruction set. With SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, they did not bother to incorporate support for the new instruction set instructions. In certain circumstances, the database does not operate properly. It is unable to do what it needs to do. If you do your research and go on the internet and see what happens with Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, what comes back is that it takes 4% longer to perform a lot of the instructions. When you are using the new instruction set, it adds 4% to the runtime of the database.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The data governance prospect... from what I've seen, that is a really powerful tool as well, to help with data lineage and keeping track of that."
"There is minimal on-going maintenance."
"The speed has been excellent for us, in pulling information, as well as the batch timing, and the suite of tools that comes with it for the ETL with IBM InfoSphere."
"Those reports were improved from a couple of hours to minutes."
"For every organization that I have been in that has Netezza, the ability to load and run queries is greatly simplified and A LOT faster than any other DBMS out there."
"Compared to other RDBMS, Netezza provides much higher performance and much lower maintenance effort Compared to Teradata, lower cost and lower administration"
"Setup is not that complex. Within 24 hours we had everything completed and had copied the dataset from Oracle."
"The performance is most important to me, and it helps our ability to make business decisions quickly."
"They provide easy integration with other systems."
"This is a wonderful database that is, in my opinion, underrated."
"Sufficient, robust, power DB."
"In SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, there are some built-in stored procedures that you can use to fire those commands and get the data in a very systematic manner where you can see the results."
"This product has my complete confidence."
"During the last 20 years, I have never had a stability problem with this product."
"SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is a good transactional database."
"The financials is the most valuable feature for us in operational terms because we deal with a lot of services and SAP has integrated everything for us, both financial reporting and operations."
 

Cons

"The product cost is high compared to others in the market, and this cost has become unbearable for me."
"In Aginity there should be a way to format the SQL queries."
"The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because, early on, there were a couple of maintenance things that we had to do."
"I am using SAS and it's a dis-appointment due to limited in-DB processing, including data connection pool, that was never resolved by both SAS and IBM Netezza."
"The scalability is not as expected. The capacity in this black box is not enough."
"Matching up with big data. Netezza has been built only for OLAP and structured data, and I think IBM must do something to match it to Hadoop scalability."
"The scalability is not good. They claim it's scalable but it's not, especially in comparison with other solutions."
"Data lineage on column or even object level does not exist, therefore external applications have to be used"
"The overall performance of the product is an area where the tool has certain shortcomings and needs to improve."
"I think that the solution needs to be positioned better within the market as it appears as though the Adaptive Server is being left out of the SAP scope."
"Cluster features: The Cluster Edition didn't get the same level of reliability as the Enterprise Edition did."
"Better promotion. Sybase seems little known."
"There could be some improvements in barcode scanning and RFID access."
"Cost-wise, SAP is still expensive compared to other available products."
"In my opinion, product support is not that great from SAP because they have already declared the end-of-date for SAP ASE. They will be stopping product support."
"There is lack of good support in Mexico - I would prefer Oracle or IBM over SAP in terms of support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very expensive. It has a lot CPUs with a lot of components in it. It also has built-in redundancy for resiliency reasons."
"The annual licensing fees are twenty-two percent of the product cost."
"Expensive to maintain compared to other solutions."
"The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"Netezza is a costly solution. It does serve a specific purpose but it's costlier than what's available in the market, if you go to the cloud."
"For me, mainly, it reduces my costs. It's not only the appliance cost. There are also support costs and a maintenance costs. It does reduce the costs very drastically."
"The licensing cost for ASE is pretty low."
"Price-wise, the product is worth it since one needs very less infrastructure to use it."
"I rate SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise's pricing a six out of ten."
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Comparison Review

it_user232068 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 5, 2015
Netezza vs. Teradata
Original published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-i-choose-net Two leading Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architectures for Data Warehousing (DW) are IBM PureData System for Analytics (formerly Netezza) and Teradata. I thought talking about the similarities and differences…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise33
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only availab...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The solution has generally received positive feedback from me and is recommended for continued use by end users. However, the product cost is high compared to others in the market, and this cost ha...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?
From a pricing perspective, I would say the solution is fairly priced. In Oracle, you have two or three databases at most on one machine. In SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, one machine can have mul...
What needs improvement with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?
SAP is not putting money into modernizing SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. One of the things I discovered on the last project I was on was that they did not incorporate the Intel new instruction set...
What is your primary use case for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?
I have worked with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise IQ, and Replication Server. I also worked with SQL Anywhere at one point. SAP acquired Sybase at one point, and the...
 

Also Known As

Netezza Performance Server, Netezza, Netezza Analytics
SAP ASE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Seattle Childrens Hospital, Carphone Warehouse, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Battelle, Start Today Co. Ltd., Kelley Blue Book, Trident Marketing, Elisa Corporation, Catalina Marketing, iBasis, Barnes & Noble, Qualcomm, MediaMath, Acxiom, iBasis, Foxwoods
City of Buenos Aires, ASR Group, Citrix, EarlySense, Usha International Limited, Automotive Resources International (ARI), Takisada-Osaka Co. Ltd., Coelba (Grupo Neoenergia), RZD Russian Railways, National Basketball Association - NBA, TALLY
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: September 2026.
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