SAP IQ vs SQL Server comparison

SAP and Microsoft are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. SAP is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.0, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. SAP holds a 0.8% mindshare in SQL, compared to Microsoft’s 17.9% mindshare. Additionally, 84% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

SAP IQ

Read 21 SAP IQ reviews

369 Views
261 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

SQL Server

Read 268 SQL Server reviews

16,970 Views
12,982 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SAP IQ

SQL Server

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

SQL Server and SAP IQ compete in the database management and business intelligence category. SQL Server appears to have the upper hand with its comprehensive feature set and strong Microsoft support, although SAP IQ's performance in data warehousing is highly regarded.

Features: SQL Server is known for its scalability, user-friendly syntax, and robust features such as In-Memory OLTP, AlwaysOn availability groups, and advanced data transformation tools, making it versatile for businesses of all sizes. SAP IQ offers optimized storage and high performance suitable for business intelligence and analytical queries. Its columnar storage technology provides impressive compression, making it an ideal choice for large-scale data warehousing.

Room for Improvement: SQL Server faces challenges with latency, high update costs, and limited remote access security. It requires improvements in stability and integration. SAP IQ's primary issues are its high cost and a need for better marketing and support, particularly in metadata consistency and multiplex functionality.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SQL Server offers multiple deployment options, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. It benefits from comprehensive customer service backed by Microsoft's extensive resources. In contrast, SAP IQ primarily supports on-premises installations with limited cloud capabilities, and users note a lack of adequate product support.

Pricing and ROI: SQL Server, while competitively priced, can be considerable depending on the version, but users find decent ROI due to its feature richness. SAP IQ is perceived as costly but offers significant performance benefits with large database implementations, justifying the price for many users.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP IQ vs. SQL Server Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ vs. SQL Server

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

SAP IQ

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

27th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (14th)

SQL Server

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

268

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of SAP IQ is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SQL Server is 17.9%, down from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Tejas Raj

Manager at Capgemini

Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation

I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.

Read full review

AhmadTalha

Product owner at Digitt Plus (AFT)

A robust and secure solution that helps to store data

The GUI needs improvement. From a technical perspective, it's quite complex, which may not be a problem for individuals with technical backgrounds like ours, especially since we've encountered similar interfaces. However, navigating the GUI can be challenging for newcomers or product owners without technical experience. For example, as someone transitioning from a developer role to a product management role, I find it relatively easy to use the GUI. But for those without a technical background, it's much more challenging to grasp what's happening.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is very robust for ad hoc DW queries and its columnar compression is unique and valuable."

"IQ is a very high-performance and high-transaction database."

"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."

"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."

"The product is easy to learn."

"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The column-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution."

More SAP IQ pros

"Without any doubt the Integration Services and Analysis Services are the most widely used. These are the basis for data quality, data gathering, ETL process, as well as collation for the data warehouse, Cube-generation, and ad-hoc processes. The ease in which you may mold a process flow or even modularly add in new structures is something which is much needed in my job."

"The pricing of the product is very good."

"It works fine in terms of performance and stability."

"The fact that SQL Server fully integrates within the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a plus."

"SQL Server has good performance. It is one of the best features."

"I haven't really experienced any issues that required the assistance of technical support."

"Its speed and the ease of server management are valuable. If I compare Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, what I like in Microsoft SQL Server is the speed. We are using Microsoft Management Studio for managing our Microsoft SQL Server, and the user interface that I get to work with is also better."

"SQL Server is a very mature solution."

More SQL Server pros

Cons

"Concurrency and functional error messaging."

"The only negative aspect of IQ is the cost, which can be challenging for companies in Peru."

"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."

"The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru."

"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."

"The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."

"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."

"Multiplex is very problematic. There are consistency problems in the metadata, meaning it is possible to lose metadata consistency. You should make sure you have healthy backups."

More SAP IQ cons

"The interface could be updated to make it slightly more user-friendly."

"It could be more stable."

"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 product overall would benefit from the addition of better tutorials to help master the skills necessary to actually build a project database. Right now, what is available isn't sufficient."

"The agility of the non-SQL-based features is relevant on the market."

"SQL Server needs to improve in performance and monitoring because there are no specific monitoring solutions to detect and analyze events for issues in the database. You have to use another monitoring solution. If Microsoft could provide an update to this solution or provide a monitoring solution specifically for SQL Server, it would be very valuable."

"Only one CPU core can be used. Can’t move a database between servers easily. Can’t use triggers."

"The licensing is pretty expensive."

More SQL Server cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."

"Negotiate based on the features required."

"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."

"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."

"Negotiation is very important."

"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."

"There is a license to use this solution. However, the model is not easy to understand. There is a guide you have to read about all the information on how it works. If you read this documentation, you can understand how it works. We are paying for our SQL Servers by CPU cores with an enterprise license."

"There is a license required for the use of SQL Server and we are on an annual subscription."

"Pricing is reasonable for small organizations, but the scaling increases the price."

"The price of the solution is very expensive. If I went with the cloud version of SQL a license would cost me approximately 11,000 Riyals per month."

"Our customers do pay license fees for the MS SQL Server but the Rabbit is free, as it is open-source software."

"I would rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. It is not extremely cheap but also it's not the most expensive product."

"The free version is cumbersome to use and maintain. But $5000 for a licence is more expense than the benefit I would get from a licensed version. A licence might be worth the price to simplify management and speed up searches."

"We are on a monthly subscription and the price could improve. However, the price has worked out well in some deployments. The problem is you never know what kind of services been installed and you have to be in touch with many people, such as which servers are active or which are not. I did face a couple of issues in terms of subscriptions and the pricing model. They have improved over time."

More SQL Server pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

46%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

47%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?

IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP IQ?

The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru.

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What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?

I worked on implementing new databases, migration data in production, and developer environments with SAP IQ.

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Would you say the price of SQL Server is high compared to that of similar products?

SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs you are using. If you compare the product to others in this category, the price...

See all answers

Has using SQL Server helped your organization in any way?

SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller pieces so the machines can easily deal with it. However, this comes with a h...

See all answers

Which authentication mode is best for SQL Server?

My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect the two, out of security concerns and to keep things separated for our own pur...

See all answers

Comparisons

Snowflake vs SAP IQ

Compared 30% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 15% of the time

Apache Hadoop vs SAP IQ

Compared 9% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 8% of the time

Vertica vs SAP IQ

Compared 8% of the time

More SAP IQ Competitors

SAP HANA vs SQL Server

Compared 14% of the time

MariaDB vs SQL Server

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SQL Server

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Database vs SQL Server

Compared 9% of the time

LocalDB vs SQL Server

Compared 8% of the time

More SQL Server Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ

April 2025

Download SAP IQ product report

Buyer's Guide

SQL Server

March 2025

Download SQL Server product report

Also Known As

Sybase IQ

Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL

Overview

SAP® IQ software delivers speed and power for extreme-scale enterprise data warehousing and analytics. Its column-oriented, grid-based massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and patented data compression and indexing technologies enable companies to exploit the value of huge amounts of data at the speed of business.

SAP

SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.

The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.

The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:

SQL Server Developer
SQL Server Expression
SQL Server Standard
SQL Server Enterprise

The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.

The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:

Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.
Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.
Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.
String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.
System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.

SQL Server Services

SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:

Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.
Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication.
Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.
Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.
Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.
Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.
Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.
Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.
Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.

SQL Server Benefits

The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:

The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.
Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.
The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.
SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.
SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.
The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.

Reviews from Real Users

A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature.

Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.

Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ vs. SQL Server

April 2025

Free Report: SAP IQ vs. SQL Server

Find out what your peers are saying about SAP IQ vs. SQL Server and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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