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IBM Db2 Logo

Flexible data management platform

Last updated: October 2024

IBM Db2 Features

Features Summary

Functionality

4.4

/5

52

Total features

8

3 categories

IBM Db2 features

Backup and Recovery
Data Dictionary Management
Database Conversion
ETL - Extract Transfer Load
In-Database Processing
In-Memory Processing
Monitoring
Relational Database Management

Common features of Data Warehouse software

API
Access Controls/Permissions
Activity Dashboard
Ad hoc Analysis
Ad hoc Reporting
Alerts/Notifications
Configuration Management
Customizable Reports

Price starts from

1000

Pricing options
Free plan
Subscription
Free trial

Screenshots

Contenders comparison

Functionality

4.4

/5

52

Price starts from

1000

Total Features

8

Unique features

  • In-Memory Processing

Functionality

4.5

/5

461

Price starts from

ic-pricetag

No pricing info

Total Features

28

Features in Common

6

Unique features

  • Alerts/Notifications

  • Multiple Programming Languages Supported

  • Access Controls/Permissions

  • Data Discovery

Functionality

4.4

/5

49

Price starts from

80

Per month

Total Features

137

Features in Common

3

Unique features

  • OLAP

  • Third-Party Integrations

  • Built-In Database

  • CRM

Common IBM Db2 comparisons

IBM Db2 logo
Oracle Database logo
IBM Db2vsOracle Database
IBM Db2 logo
Google Cloud logo
IBM Db2vsGoogle Cloud
IBM Db2 logo
MySQL logo
IBM Db2vsMySQL

Reviewers who mentioned features said:

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Luis Alexis R.

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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In My professional life I have used DB2 on the AS / 400 and e_Series platform for more than 15 years

Reviewed 6 years ago

Implementing in record time allowing operating different system projects in the companies where I worked, you can be quiet because the data of the companies are based on a robust database eliminated the level of distress, allows access to your level of user user security to the system users allowing them to elaborate the data of the database in an excel sheet for example.

Pros

Easy database Implementation easy administration can be managed from any station the level of specialization is much lower than any other database, robust and recovery by indexes, interconnects with other databases such as Sql Server and allows data sharing in Immediately, its level of robustness and integrity is unique.

Cons

Proprietary database, requires a lot of Hardware for its good performance and its costs are high.

MS
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Maha S.

Computer Software, 501-1,000 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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IBM DB2: A high availability Relational Database

Reviewed a year ago
Pros

The main project that made me involved in working with DB2 is a transactional concurrency benchmark that compares IBM DB2 to Oracle 10g RDBMS. The benchmark results demonstrated high scalability and availability properties in DB2 but the TPS measures showed a better performance of Oracle 10g on HP ML350 servers. DB2 supported better concurrency in bulk data-intensive SQL queries but lagged in computation-intensive tasks.

Cons

The programming language support is definitely something that needs improvement in addition to cloud integration and deployment tools. Many other commercial RDBMSes (such as Oracle) are leading ahead on this front. OS support, such as testing OS X platforms, can be also better provided in DB2l

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Verified reviewer

Insurance, 201-500 employees

Used other for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend5/10

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IBM D2

Reviewed 6 years ago

I would recommend use of DB2 in modern tech advancements. Light weight DB like MySQL, postgres are much better.

Pros

Db2 was used in our mainframe application. it accepts standard sql syntax. can handle large amount of data.

Cons

As data grows in production environment, it becomes slow. Thread hung and application performance degrades. Also it's costly.

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Verified reviewer

Food & Beverages, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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29/5000 Extremely stable and safe

Reviewed 4 years ago

Over 10 years using DB2 I can affirm that it is a very secure bank, with updates that bring new features, high compaction power and geographic contingency features gave us the security to work with SAP.

Pros

DB2 HAS A SERIES OF TOOLS THAT ARE DIFFERENTIAL, BUT HIGHLIGHTING THE CAPACITY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT (PARAMETERIZATION) AND DATA COMPACTION. ARE STRONG POINTS TO CONSIDER.

Cons

The acquisition cost can be a hindrance in the acquisition negotiations. Support is also a weakness for the cost, forcing the use of DB2 communities for troubleshooting.

SZ
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Sean Z.

Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Heavy and expensive, but good at what it does

Reviewed 4 years ago
Pros

Db2 scales very well AFTER a certain point. Support is excellent, it's easy to get stood up once you have a feel for what you're doing.

Cons

Scaling: for instance it won't run on small machines too well. This becomes important if you're running a local copy for development or testing. There is a free Community Edition to play with, but can't take advantage of tons of ram or CPU, but good for POC.

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Riya J.

Computer & Network Security, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Best database for large volume data

Reviewed 2 years ago

We are using IBM db2 to store large volume of sensitive user data which scale automatically when required, it allows multiple concurrent transactions with no data redundancy and maintains the isolation property.

Pros

IBM DB2 provides the low latency and high data availability, It provides automatic scaling and high security for the large volume of data. It is robust No matter how much amount of data is, IBM DB2 will never fail.

Cons

IBM Db2 is a bit expensive and not all the SQL standards available in the IBM Db2

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Warwick B.

Information Technology and Services, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used weekly for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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The best database software in the marketplace

Reviewed 3 years ago

This tool is effectively and efficiently being used in some specific departments of our organization. Overall, it is a great tool that has been really beneficial for our company. I find the customer support of IBM Db2 the best product support team as whenever we have questions they just respond to them in the quickest way.

Pros

I have been using this product in our company for a long time as Database-as-a-Service on our cloud for different requirements such as storing and even manipulating data safely with timely availability. This product has been providing services that help in storing and running all the problems in order to evaluate the data. This tool allows us to modify the processing speed of our company’s data just to enhance the overall user experience. Moreover, I am a frequent user of this tool and having great experience of this tool.

Cons

I felt there is a storage capacity problem which sometimes makes it difficult to check the effectiveness of the entire database.

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senthamizhselvan E.

Insurance, 5,001-10,000 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend6/10

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IBM db2

Reviewed 6 years ago
Pros

This can hold n number of records and easy to access it via online application and updated using the informatica

Cons

The application looks and query are bit complicated compared to SQL

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Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Proven for enterprise workloads

Reviewed 6 years ago

Have used DB2 as a Relational Database (RDBMS) for the past 10 years, primarily to support SAP based enterprise workloads. IBM's development of DB2 has been fuelled by one of its largest customers - SAP. As such this review will be biased towards SAP. I started with DB2 7.5 on IBM's flagship AIX Operating System, and it has come a long way. These days AIX is dead (unfortunately), and IBM's Power platform is leveraging Linux. DB2 of course supports the big-endian based Power platforms, and the little-endian based x86 platforms that run both Linux and Windows. DB2 is very versatile as a database, and supports most features that enterprise-based databases like Oracle support. It really is a matter of choice. DB2 administrators are obviously not as easy to find as Oracle's, but so long as the DBA's have good knowledge they can be cross-trained easily.

Pros

- ACID compliant like any good RDBMS (Oracle, MSSQL, SAP HANA) - Runs well and scales well on IBM's Power-based platform, and commodity x86 hardware running Linux/Windows - Various editions to suit customer needs and requirements. For example the Developer Edition is fully featured and is completely free for developers to use, or all the way to Enterprise Edition for state-of-the-art functionality (In-Memory based Columnar Tables thru its BLU functionality, High-Availability, Disaster Recovery etc. to prevent Single-Points-of-Failure). Rivals the existing enterprise RDBMS's

Cons

- Even though there is a GUI for point-and-click administration (IBM Data Studio), to really flex the database's features and functionality command-line tools are required (like Oracle :-)

SC
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Steven C.

Financial Services, 10,001+ employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend5/10

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Db2 in financial services

Reviewed 4 years ago

Straightforward to install and manage. Solid deployments but features can be behind. This is acceptable in our organisation, but may not be desirable in cutting edge companies.

Pros

In my employed role we use DB2 for warehousing, marts and as simple data stores. It is an integral part of back and metadata for Cognos and DataStage. It was simple to install and by default comes as self managed. We also deploy this for hosting customer data and integration with net backup, ha solutions and job scheduling is industry standard.

Cons

Vendor can be a little hard to work with on issues, getting the required information can be a drawn out process when trying to fix a live issue. This has improved over the years and support is more flexible in investigating while reports are generated. Functionality is competitive, but bleeding edge features (NoSql) can lag behind others.

sv
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shashank v.

Information Technology and Services, 501-1,000 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Best RDBMS Software

Reviewed 6 years ago

My experience using this RDBMS software is very good as retrieving of data from the database is very fast. We can execute complex queries in a smooth way. I actually wanted to store XML data inside the database in case of any B2B transactions that I need to store for further processing. DB2 database has the capability to store XML data and store some large files in regards to that transaction details.

Pros

1) DB2 is very cheap, easy to install. We don't have to worry about license costs as they wouldn't be more than that in Oracle. 2) It can run on any OS like windows, Linux, Mac. 3) We can use DB2 along with XML data also. 4) The retrieving of data from the db2 database is very fast which is actually a very good feature. 5) Can store large files in the database in an easy way. 6) We can store the data in different locations across the data and the data can be accessed from different locations in a faster way. 7) Index feature is available in DB2 to identify a unique table out of thousands of tables in DB2 database.

Cons

I didn't find any flaws using this software.

sf
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syed f.

Information Technology and Services, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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IBM Db2

Reviewed 2 years ago
Pros

As of now ibm db2 database is the best provided by IBM technology which have best costumer support and best recovery system where need not to wait long time best resolving any issue are given as fast and can and easy to handle and use

Cons

there no least in IBMdb2 which has the best over all experience ever has has the best user experience till now

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Jeremias E.

Education Management, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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My DB2 Experience

Reviewed 5 years ago

Learning a fully functional database or DBMS may require an educational institution to buy licensed software to be installed in the laboratory. IBM DB2 Express-C is a free closed- source software that a student can use. Even a student could download and have the personal copy of the application as he learns database during the course.

Pros

IBM DB2 gives a start up point for a student to learn databases. All the features a DBMS have are provided by DB2. The product supports almost any front-end application that requires database. All the drivers are provided as you setup a connection to an application. IBM DB2 is not limited in learning SQL scripts. You may initiate also database back up and security, XML, stored procedures, and user-defined functions.

Cons

IBM DB2 is a high-secured database server. You may be lost in the installation process if you missed one of its steps. If you experience failed installation, uninstalling it may not fully do the trick. You need to delete folders or directories it has created during installation.

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Verified reviewer

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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Robust database engine, but takes quite a bit of getting use to.

Reviewed 7 years ago

This database engine is robust, with many tools and features. Easily upgraded. Minimal maintenance needed after it is up and running. Able to use either the command line interface or GUI to access and manipulate databases.

Pros

This database engine is robust, with many tools and features. Easily upgraded. Minimal maintenance needed after it is up and running. Able to use either the command line interface or GUI to access and manipulate databases.

Cons

Documentation needs to be more extensive, as you have to pay for customer support. Takes quite a bit of getting use to, as syntax varies greatly from other DBMSs.

MA
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Mehak A.

Computer Software, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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A very secure, stable and DB with great performance.

Reviewed 4 years ago

We used it for projects that have a huge database and complex queries, the experience was great as the ability to handle complex queries reduced the load on our application.

Pros

It's fairly easy to set up and offers a lot of functionality, it's very easy to connect to most of the UI tools and framework. The security features make it ideal for banking applications. It is such a powerful tool that optimized requested works super fast.

Cons

The only issue I think is its price, Db2 is quite costly as compared to its competitors, it does offer a great selection of feature so that also can be overlooked.

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Verified reviewer

11-50 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Great product, easy to install and use. Been using it for 6 years in different projects.

Reviewed 6 years ago
Pros

Installation is very easy and when installed it's ease of use, very convenient. It's also very easy to connect to other tools like DBVisualizer which gives another way of viewing the tables and info.

Cons

They need to improve the help online to find some commands, and the explanation on the commands as well.

LP
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Lukasz P.

Retail, 201-500 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Stable and reliable ! Simply - It work s , even better that You expected

Reviewed 7 years ago

Stability , performance , reliability

Pros

This product is very stable , it can be fully trusted . It's optimisation is perfect - every request can be optimised smoothly and without user interactions

Cons

Price - it could be better - but You know that Your money were well spend . Also support could be more active

AV
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Alexandra V.

Automotive, 201-500 employees

Used daily for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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IBM DB2 is the best and most powerful relational database management system

Reviewed 2 years ago

DB2 provides best relational database for huge amount of data.

Pros

Robust relational database management system to store huge amount of complex data with high scalability and performance SQL dialect.

Cons

High cost product and its version upgrades require an outage.

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Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services, 5,001-10,000 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend6/10

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IBM DB2 user since several months

Reviewed 6 years ago

We load all the sales data into DB2 system and will derive analytics on top of it. I can recommand if you have lot of budget to put on database managemnet.

Pros

1) DB2 has extensive functionality, has a lot of built-in features. robust database software 2) easy to use, and MPP systems which make the system to process data parallel. 3) DB2 SQL is anscii standard so migration to/from other databases would be easy.

Cons

1) expensive compared to other solutions available in market. 2) Few of the DB2 specific syntaxes are non convertable when we move to other databases.

NS
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Nazeer S.

Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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One of the most used DBs

Reviewed 8 years ago

DB2 is one of the most used DBs. It is based on Mainframe technology. It easily integrates with IBM BPM, IBM Datapower very well. Task Scheduler component of DB2 allows for statistics gathering and reorganization of indexes and tables without user interaction. DB2 has comprehensive suite of security features such as authentication, authorization, trusted context, auditing, encryption, and fine-grain controls.

Pros

No pros were added to this review

Cons

Pricing is little high

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Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services, 5,001-10,000 employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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A powerful relational database

Reviewed 3 years ago

Overall satisfied, used in couple of my projects, even with AS400.

Pros

Easy to integrate with any API with minimal configuration

Cons

Searching large amount of data might take time, indexing strategy could be better

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Verified reviewer

Insurance, 501-1,000 employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Very powerful database engine

Reviewed 5 years ago
Pros

I liked the raw power of the utility. I was able to run millions, sometimes billions of rows of data through and it handled it just fine. The included functions were very helpful in translating complex data structures

Cons

None really. It did everything I needed. Maybe the only complaint would be how complex it is, but that is more of a feature not a bug

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Gerson M.

Used other for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Robustness and Reliability

Reviewed 7 years ago

DB2 is relatively simple to maintain and performs very well.

Pros

Super powerful and valuable for its automatic applications, security, data integrity oriented and the backup and recovery features. Reliable for any volume of data and transactions.

Cons

Not many updates or improves for a very long time. Forcing to move your data to the cloud. For some that's not an answer. However I recommend it.

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John E.

Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

Used weekly for 2+ years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Solid database solution

Reviewed 6 years ago
Pros

Like other IBM products, Db2 is light and easy to install and maintain. It's incredibly robust and can handle very large volume of data with ease. I also like the support for the product from IBM.

Cons

IBM Db2 is very expensive to maintain compared to its competitors. Another issue for me is the lack of timely updates.

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RAJESH G.

1,001-5,000 employees

Used weekly for 1-2 years

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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IBM DB2 is an excellent database platform

Reviewed 7 years ago
Pros

IBM DB2 is an excellent database platform. We are able to use it as a database platform for large corporates. It is designed to store, analyze and retrieve the data efficiently, hence one of the commonly used database platform.

Cons

There is nothing which we do not like about this database platform. everything looks so good about it.