IBM Z vs. SingleStore

We found its Data processing marvelous, and its benefit to accomplish chores in time gives us high authenticity and availability to the data deposit with accelerated admittance. One thing I will say that try to make it more user-friendly as it is difficult to learn. We liked it overall; Working is very good.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Transactional processing, including data entry across multiple departments
• Reporting on massive amounts of data, due to its scale and size of processing capabilities
• Analytics on data as there are various accelerators for both IBM's databases and others such as Oracle
• Security is another major benefit to this platform as it contains a non-open systems design

Incentivized

• Return results of complex queries scanning TBs of data in sub-seconds.
• Customer support team answer tickets quickly and provide guidance.
• MySQL engine which allows to query using simple MySQL drivers from different clients.
• Queries profiling is easy to use and helps investigating performance.

Incentivized

• IBM needs to add more focus on simplifying mainframe usage and management.
• Most modern programmers interface with the Z using an IDE. However, performing many tasks, such as cataloging a data set or checking on a job status, can require switching to the ISPF interface. Users want to interface with a GUI, not a function-key, menu and character-based interface like ISPF. Anything that can simplify and modernize interfacing with the mainframe should be a high priority for IBM.
• The IBM Z platform is one of the most instrumented computing platforms in the world, so there are a lot of metrics that could be automatically analyzed and used to improve the performance and management of the mainframe environment.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

The IBM Z mainframe capabilities are unmatched for cloud readiness and optimization the learning capabilities are matched perfectly with Watson and the expandability of the cloud makes it a perfect choice.

Incentivized

We haven't seen a faster relation database. Period. Which is why we are super happy customers and will for sure renew our license.

Incentivized

pay as you go pricing

Incentivized

[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.

Incentivized

The Z in IBM Z is for zero down time. If you configure your system according to IBM's best practices, you can achieve zero downtime

Incentivized

I really can't remember a time when it was not available

Incentivized

Performance is a major part when you configure your system. IBM has many tools to study your system and suggest the appropriate configuration. With the right contract, you can add processing power dynamically and remove it when no longer needed

Incentivized

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.

Support is usually superb, only occasionally dropping to very good. We participate in some of the CD (Continuous Delivery) aspects of z/OS, IMS, MQ, and DB2.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Over my 33 years on this platform, I attended many in person courses, conferences, and other training opportunities.

Incentivized

There are many online courses from both IBM and other vendors. Most are great. All of the documentation is available online.

Incentivized

Would prefer in person training but for online training, it's almost as good as in person

Incentivized

I do not personally have any key insights regarding implementation of IBM Z Enterprise Servers as that is what our mainframe architects do.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

My answer is yes. This made moving to the cloud much easier. The main benefits of this are latency and data extraction. The speed, security and reliability is the game changer and where it stacks up when compared to other IBM products. Additionally, increasing the workload is also very helpful. Use a single platform to avoid unnecessary activities and actions, help maintain safety, and even recover quickly. Activities that users are unable to continue and complete tasks help avoid mistakes when there are errors related to And because it's perfect for your users, it has less impact on your business. Always ready for backup. I didn't even care about the migrations that were performed.

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.

Incentivized

If you need more processing power, just add more CPU's or memory. The largest system can have close to 200 CPU's and 40 TB of memory. If that is not enough, you can add more physical computers, and connect them using a sysplex

Incentivized

Very reliable. Coming from mariadb, singlestore has made our application more reliable and faster!

Incentivized

• It has increased the reliability of data which has decreased our dependence on legacy systems.
• It has no loss while migration which has a positive impact on ROI as we don't have to worry about data loss.
• It has multi tasking and support for non-cobol applications on mainframe.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized