IBM Big SQL Interface Out-Performs the Others

At the recent Insight and IDUG conferences IBM talked about its many new software products for modern corporation information management.  These new products handle the constant flow of inexhaustible big data from new data resources like social data from Facebook, Twitter and other sources; location or motion data from the Internet of things, phones or vehicles; and customer data from a variety of sources.  IBM’s information management software portfolio adds new, deep, and open source functionality extensions which furnish platforms and services to analyze, aggregate, and provide actionable insights for your company.

These IBM information management products leverage traditional and Hadoop data stores so any type of structured or unstructured data from any source can be captured and analyzed.

The IBM portfolio starts with Watson cognitive products which can discover and analyze all types of data sources containing all sorts of text, pattern, and algorithms against big data.  There are several specialized Watson efforts, along with the new IBM product Watson Data Explorer, that let you discover, navigate, and visualize big data sources.

IBM’s Big Insights product provides a high performance Hadoop data store along with a huge number optimized extensions for administration, scheduling, and especially SQL.  IBM has improved on the open-source products, such as Hadoop, to make time-to-value a key point for the IBM software solutions.

The biggest value differentiator comes from the IBM Big Insights SQL interface.  It runs considerably faster than the open source Big SQL and SQL Impala products and uses standard ASNI SQL compatible with the DB2 Family.  According to IBM, the Big Insights runs 5.6x faster than the open source Big SQL and 3.6x faster than SQL Impala, giving better performance for all types of new Hadoop applications. IBM’s Big Insights SQL interface performance tests and improvements, along with its ANSI 2011 standard SQL, makes the product a great interface for analyzing and sharing data with traditional DB2 databases and data warehouses.

What is also great is that IBM has also made the new IBM Big Insight SQL interface against Hadoop data available within the cloud Cloudant offerings.  This helps IBM Cloudant shine as the clear performance winner for the cloud NoSQL database choice.  IBM performance tests shows that the IBM Cloudant solution is 83% faster than Amazon Service, 48% better than MongoDB, 32% better than DataStax, and 20% faster than Couchbase.

Another feature that gives the advantage to the IBM Cloudant solution is that it can be deployed locally prior to being expanded to the external Cloudant environment.  This provides a stepping stone approach to measure and analyze the Database-as-a-Service activities around security, performance factors, and deployment procedures prior to externalizing it to a public cloud environment.  IBM Cloudant also provides cloud solutions which are compatible and compliant with country-sensitive PII data and security concerns.

These are only some of the new IBM offerings for handling the big data deluge.  IBM has many more announcements that I’ll talk about in the coming weeks.


Dave Beulke is a system strategist, application architect, and performance expert specializing in Big Data, data warehouses, and high performance internet business solutions. He is an IBM Gold Consultant, Information Champion, and President of DAMA-NCR, former President of International DB2 User Group, and frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His architectures, designs, and performance tuning techniques help organization better leverage their information assets, saving millions in processing costs.

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