We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"They have improved the UI and ease of accessing the database and server which is good. You can load it up and start using it from the very minute it is implemented."
"A valuable feature of the solution is that it is comparatively simpler to manage than Oracle."
"Features like autoscaling, business continuity, and security are beneficial. The tool's compatibility with almost all of the enterprise-class applications is also beneficial for users."
"I haven't really experienced any issues that required the assistance of technical support."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"The Always On tool improves the SQL server availability."
"We are using the net for our environment. We're using the ADF Azure data factory for our analysis services, and it is pretty good."
"It's a very stable solution."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"It could have more options for themes."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"Its ability to handle certain kinds of large data could be improved."
"Indexing, as well as integration, are areas of this product that need improvement."
"I would like Microsoft to evolve SQL Server because stateful databases dying are in a way. We would like to find out if it can absorb Hadoop and other similar things. They should make it useful for data mining. Data is evolving forever, and how we store it is also changing constantly. So, SQL Server also needs to change."
"The remote access aspect needs to be improved in terms of security."
"Additional interfaces would be an improvement."
"Performance could be improved. There could be more support to PHP-based websites and to providing direct plugins for connections, and the related services or application services could be improved."
"I would like to see the database become fully automated."
"Could have additional security."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and QlikView.
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