SAP IQ vs SQL Server comparison

SAP and Microsoft are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. SAP is ranked #26 with an average rating of 7.7, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. SAP holds a 0.7% mindshare in SQL, compared to Microsoft’s 18.6% 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

364 Views
264 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

SQL Server

Read 268 SQL Server reviews

18,969 Views
14,206 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SAP IQ

SQL Server

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ vs. SQL Server

February 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 842,767 peers since 2012

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

26th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (13th)

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 April 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of SAP IQ is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SQL Server is 18.6%, down from 23.1% 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

Azizul Haque

AVP, IT Division at NCC BANK LIMITED

It has eliminated all kinds of inconsistencies, and it is reliable, secure, and fast

I don't know whether SQL Server can support large organizations where the database size is more than 100 GB. It might be because of SQL Server, or it might be because of the programming of the software vendor, but a lot of people think that it is a problem with SQL Server. It can't handle a large amount of data or large data size. In terms of its usage, about 90% of our applications are running on the SQL Server database. We have around 1,600 users for our software, and all the applications are connected to the SQL Server database.

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

"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."

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

"The primary benefit of SAP IQ is its ability to limit the expansion of the costly SAP HANA database, which has limited storage capacity. This necessitates a form of data management that involves moving data from SAP HANA to SAP NLS, which is essentially archiving. This allows us to retain access to the data via a link whenever it is required."

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

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

"Valuable features for us include the compression, speed, fast response time, and easy object maintenance."

"The product is easy to learn."

More SAP IQ pros

"From a security perspective, we have no complaints."

"SQL Server is quite stable. And now we are using the Lattice 2017 version."

"We like business integration, database, and analysis."

"The management studio is probably the thing we use the most for running quick queries and creating quick reports. Quite often, somebody comes and says, "Hey, can you find XYZ?" It is so much easier just to jump in there and run a quick query."

"I have found SQL Server easy to use."

"The scalability is very good."

"The Azure SQL Server database requires almost zero maintenance and management."

"It is a pretty good solution. The on-premise version 2019 has many features, and they had introduced a really good and stable environment in version 2019. It has very good integration with big data clusters and other things. It covers pretty much everything that you can do with a SQL server. You can use any language to connect to it, which is not there in other solutions. They have also introduced Python, and it also has ArcScale. PaaS is a modern, scalable database. You can use Power Automate and a lot of features in this. It is very easy, and you don't have to worry about versions and upgrades. Microsoft keeps on adding new features to this solution. Microsoft is improving its connectivity on an ongoing basis. It connects well with Office 365. If you see something not working, in a couple of weeks, it is going to work because there is a team working on it. You can vote for the things that are missing, and Microsoft can work on them depending on the product that they're launching."

More SQL Server pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

"There is very little documentation available."

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

"Concurrency and functional error messaging."

More SAP IQ cons

"Running multiple instances on the same box would be beneficial."

"There should be more tools and documentation for tuning the performance of Microsoft SQL Server. It would be nice to have more tools for tuning because currently, all the tuning that we have to do with our databases is almost manual. We have to read a bunch of knowledge base articles, and this information should be better documented. Its free text search should also be improved. It is quite important for us. Currently, we're developing our own free text search because of the lacking flexibility in Microsoft SQL Server. Therefore, we're kind of using elastic search and making different implementations in order to reach our targets. Using just the native free text search of Microsoft SQL Server is not enough for us. It should have more flexible features as compared to the current version."

"There are a few use cases where we do need the Active-Active options instead of Active-Passive, yet those kinds of options are not available for Microsoft."

"The pricing of the product could be better."

"Additional interfaces would be an improvement."

"Our biggest problem with SQL Server is latency. The communication between the cloud and the on-premises environment is slow. The data needs to be encrypted for security, and you have to exchange data certificates between environments. You can adjust the configuration to improve performance, but it would be nice if SQL Server had some templates to resolve problems."

"In my experience, I've found that scalability can be improved."

"The interface of the tool has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."

More SQL Server cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Negotiation is very important."

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

"Negotiate based on the features required."

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

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

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

"SQL Server is expensive if you use the advanced SQL version, but if you use the standard version, it's not expensive."

"Some of the licensing are very expensive, such as the Enterprise license."

"There is no licensing cost for SQL Server."

"I know the SQL Server pricing model, I believe, is based on CPU cores that your database server has, but I don't know what the solution's prices are though."

"It comes with the bundle package that we have. We have Microsoft Volume Licensing, so we don't have to pay for it separately. It is a part of the package."

"It's cheaper than Oracle."

"Historically, SQL Server has been much more affordable than Oracle, which is overpriced."

"The price for the Standard Edition is approximately $3,000 USD per core. Once you include technical support, SQL Server is cheaper than PostgreSQL and MySQL."

More SQL Server pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Relational Databases Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

45%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

53%

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 32% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 15% of the time

Apache Hadoop vs SAP IQ

Compared 12% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Exadata vs SAP IQ

Compared 7% of the time

More SAP IQ Competitors

SAP HANA vs SQL Server

Compared 15% of the time

MariaDB vs SQL Server

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SQL Server

Compared 11% of the time

LocalDB vs SQL Server

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database vs SQL Server

Compared 9% of the time

More SQL Server Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ

March 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

February 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: February 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our SAP IQ vs. SQL Server report.

See our list of best Relational Databases Tools vendors.

We monitor all Relational Databases Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.