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IBM Db2 vs Trino

IBM Db2

ibm.com

Trino

trino.io

Side by side

FigureIBM Db2Trino
Price from$630/moFree
Free planYesYes
Free trialYes—
Open source——
WebYesYes
WindowsYes—
LinuxYesYes
APIYesYes
Self-hostedYesYes
Plans published71
Spec score · Analytics Data8.4 (#7)7.4 (#23)
Spec score · Query Engine Software8.3 (#7)7.4 (#17)
Spec score · Analytics Databases8.4 (#8)7.4 (#21)
IntegrationsIBM documents connections through drivers and integrations with DataStage, Segment, Cognos Analytics, Looker, Tableau, Excel, SPSS Statistics, SAS, and R.Trino provides connectors for data sources including BigQuery, Cassandra, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis, Snowflake, and SQL Server.
SecurityIBM describes access controls, encryption for data in motion and at rest, behavior monitoring, and data masking features for Db2.Trino supports TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3, password-file, LDAP, Salesforce, OAuth 2.0, certificate, JWT, and Kerberos authentication, plus file-based, Open Policy Agent, and Ranger access control.
SupportThe pricing page lists Community Support for Db2 AI Community and Enterprise Support for Db2 AI Standard and AI Advanced.The project directs users to Slack for help and GitHub issues for bug reports.

Plans

IBM Db2

  • FreeFree
  • Performance$630 a month
  • Db2 AI CommunityFree
  • Db2 Database SaaS FreeFree
  • Db2 Database SaaS Performance$630 a month
  • Db2 AI AdvancedPriced on request
  • Db2 AI StandardPriced on request

IBM Db2 pricing →

Trino

  • Trino open sourceFree

Trino pricing →

In their own words

IBM Db2

IBM Db2 is a database for low-latency transactions, real-time analytics, and mission-critical workloads. It supports transactional, analytical, and operational work on the same database and can feed Db2 Warehouse and watsonx.data. AI-powered query optimization uses historical query patterns to adjust execution plans and automate tuning. Db2 12.1.2.0 adds a VECTOR type and SQL vector-distance queries for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, and recommendation systems. Db2 pureScale supports continuous availability on premises or in the cloud, with Pacemaker integration. Security features include access controls, encryption in transit and at rest, behavior monitoring, and data masking. IBM documents integrations with DataStage, Segment, Cognos Analytics, Looker, Tableau, Excel, SPSS Statistics, SAS, and R. Supported deployments include self-hosting and Amazon RDS for Db2. Free plans are available; Performance is listed at $630 a month, billed hourly.

Visit ibm.com

Trino

Trino is a distributed SQL query engine for analytics across large datasets held in different systems. It supports ANSI SQL and can query multiple sources together, such as joining S3 object storage data with MySQL in one query. Its parallel, distributed design is intended for efficient, low-latency analytics and data warehousing, not general-purpose relational database use or OLTP workloads. Connectors cover systems including BigQuery, Cassandra, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis, Snowflake, and SQL Server. Project-maintained client options include JDBC, Go, JavaScript, Python, and C#, alongside a command-line interface and Grafana data-source plugin. Trino runs in Kubernetes or Docker, or as a manually deployed server, and is optimized for cloud and on-premises environments including Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. AI functions support OpenAI and Anthropic directly and other models through Ollama, with the language model supplied as an external service. Trino is free under the Apache License 2.0 as self-managed software. It supports multiple authentication and access-control options, but a default installation has no security features enabled.

Visit trino.io