SAP IQ Reviews

We use SAP IQ primarily for data warehousing and business intelligence.

The most valuable features of the product are the column structure, speed, and compression. Partitioning is one of the most useful features with SAP IQ. It was something that they used to charge a lot for but it costs less now.

Actually, it is not the product that needs revision but the company itself. Sybase IQ was bought by SAP. They use it, but they don't really advertise and push it correctly. So SAP IQ — from a company standpoint — is not really supported correctly. If they did more to support the product, it would be a more popular solution.

SAP IQ has not introduced more integration with Hadoop so the two products would act in a more tightly coupled way. This would be one of the more important features that they might add. The integration with Hadoop is important because it seems everybody is going towards Hadoop for big data. You also need a system that works well. Hadoop is fast, but SAP IQ is even faster. They each have advantages, so if you can combine them, that would be good. It will work out better for cost and extra storage.

My impression from using the product over its lifetime is a little different than it is now. For IQ 16, the latest, the stability is actually quite decent. It got very, very stable. In the beginning, our implementation was slightly unstable because I changed the network to something similar to Aarna, so there were some issues because of all those changes. It was slightly unstable, but after some adjustments, it's really stable.

The product is very scalable. You can scale it upwards and sideways — that is by adding new hardware or working with software solutions. This is the only product I know which will allow you to do both.

Our company is slightly smaller than many with only about 100 users. Most probably there are more, but this is on average. It all depends on the business climate. 

Technical support for the product has become almost nonexistent for this product. There are no real agents because SAP let all the people go who were dedicated to the IQ project. Actually, I used to work for SAP. They let us all go. That's why I say there are not a lot of real experts in the SAP organization available for SAP IQ support. As far as I am concerned, that is a problem for users.

Personally, I've explored a lot of solutions. While it may not have been specifically for where I am working now, I stay aware of what is on the market. It only affects the current solution in that I am aware that there are other options, what their competitive advantages are, and features we might implement or emulate. 

For example, I've used Data Warehousing with Oracle, Dv2 also with Oracle and SQL Server. But I do not think that other products really have an advantage for warehousing over the SAP IQ solution. All of them that compete now seem to be Oracle Exadata, which is fast, but it is also very expensive. All the newer products seem to have columnized solutions as that is very advantageous for data warehousing. It is in order to compete with what SAP IQ already provided.

IQ's initial setup is relatively easy and is not that complex. The actual installation and deployment is a day or two. The biggest bottle-necks are normally encountered with the storage and having people who can configure and set up the storage correctly. The storage needs to conform to the parameters of SAP IQ. So, in reality, the time-delay is due to setting up the storage which is the big bottleneck for deployment. We can't blame the product itself.

We do our own setup and deployment.

Pricing changes. In South Africa, it depends on how the pricing is obtained. The pricing is good and it is actually better now because they are realizing that they should price it correctly according to the market. The pricing improved especially with the partitioning because they used to charge too much for that feature. They have now lowered that because obviously data warehouses get huge so when you use partitioning that it would get very expensive. It benefits people who have big databases.

As far as actual cost, there's a standard licensing fee and then there are the add-ons. The most useful and most expensive add-on was the partitioning. That's the only real additional cost that I've found useful. They also have got a high-security encryption module, but that's something that's very, very niche. So beyond the standard licensing you also have to factor in the cost of modular enhancements. But there aren't a lot of additional things you need to pay for in order to enhance what the base system does.

The only other add on that you would need to pay for is if you scale sideways. That is the multiplex which requires additional hardware.

Being in this business for a long time — now as a data architect — I've had the opportunity to use a few solutions and there are many more to research. There is a long list of products that I've worked with and evaluated. You might say that evaluation is constant but I am an expert with SAP IQ. None of the other products have capabilities that would make me suggest a shift.

In rating the product, I would give it at least an 8 out of ten. The only thing really needed to make it a ten out of ten for us and our usage is better support from the vendor. Well, I say better support but also better vision into the future. I do not think the company is doing sufficient work in development.

My advice for other people and companies considering this product as a solution is to find out if you can get proper support. I really think that's the biggest challenge facing people who use the product. The current company that owns the product, SAP, is very laid back about supporting the product.

It may be helpful to note that the solution does not require a lot of maintenance. We've really got only one or two DBAs looking after it and it is not even a full-time job. If you have a multiplex setup you may require more dedicated DBA staff for maintenance.

Once the setup is done correctly, the maintenance comes down to monitoring. There's not a lot of other effort involved in keeping things running.

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

My organization was using different RDBMs for data warehouse systems. There were obvious problems in terms of performance. Sybase IQ resolved all the performance problems we had at that time.

They should improve the backup options. There is no backup software support for Sybase IQ. You have to implement your own backup system. For large databases, you need to use disk backup solutions and it is very expensive.

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.

It is very hard to find which sessions cause a performance problem. It also has no resource manager to manage resources between consumers.

Over 15 years.

Early versions crashed frequently. Crashes (IQ freezes for no apparent reason and you have to restart it to resolve it) with the latest versions are rare.

Multiplex has some limitations and bugs. Although implementing MPX is easy, I cannot say it results in the expected scalability.

Six out of 10.

We used a different solution and then we switched to Sybase IQ. Now, because we are having some difficulties in terms of scalability, stability and performance, our DW system is being switched to a new solution again.

Both simplex and multiplex installation are very straightforward.

Negotiation is very important.

Data, and getting insight from data, is very important when it comes to competing with your competitors. You have to be fast and agile, in terms of implementing a system and development, in order to get that data insight.

• Data compression ratio
• Mass query speed

Sybase IQ, it's high compressed ratio and large query are attractive. In data warehouse experience that is a good tool and normal C/P.

We can now have over one billion rows in a table for semi-real trans-national querying. In quarterly or monthly report from billions of records, it supports and provides, stable performance.

• Admin UI
• Tuning parameters
• Maintenance tool
• UI

I've used it for over five years.

There weren't many issues.

Aborts happen, and we don't know why.

There aren't many issues.

5/10.

5/10.

We also have an Oracle solution, and these it runs in parallel with Sybase IQ.

We set it up in multi node mode, and it wasn't too complex.

We implemented with a vendor who were 6/10.

It's at about 60%.

They should simplify the classification of licenses, especially the core/store number.

• Oracle
• PostgreSQL

Take into consideration your multiplex environment and storage IOPS balance.

Sybase IQ is the only data warehousing (DWH) solution we use for reporting.

I've used it for eight years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

7/10.

6/10 because at the time I was using it, Sybase Turkey were short on staff and not very experienced.

The product is very good as a DWH & Reporting tool. It is performing well on large tables for DML operations and queries.

• Compression
• Column-based, indexes
• Speed with large queries
• Large amounts of data

While queries with previous products could run for hours, with SAP IQ, they run in a matter of minutes or seconds. Disk costs.

There could be more documentation and training.

In earlier versions, yes, but not in the past two-three versions.

None, scales to VLDB status.

An eight out of 10.

OLTP databases, but there's no comparison in terms of reporting and warehousing.

Straightforward, very easy.

Know what you are getting for your money.

No, I did not evaluate other options before choosing this product.

Do the research. This is an excellent product.

The speed of the tool - both of the query response and the loading of data.

It’s the central component of our enterprise data warehouse. Queries and reports that would require hours or days from the original source systems are now available in minutes or seconds. It’s really fast!

The stability needs improvement. We’ve upgraded through multiple minor revisions because of issues where the database server would crash when attempting to answer a perfectly legal SQL query.

We're

I've been using it for five years.

The client side of the package is a bit monolithic. We'd like to be able to roll out just the ODBC driver to client workstations through our managed desktop solution, but SAP/Sybase apparently doesn't have that capability, so we have to manually visit every workstation and install the complete client package from the DVD image.

Just the stability issues referenced above. A production database server should never crash in response to user input, but Sybase IQ has repeatedly done that for us, over multiple revisions of the product.

Not yet. We haven’t had a need to expand our Sybase IQ system yet, but their multiplex architecture seems like a useful approach if/when we need to do so.

We have to go through our systems integrator (Telus).

Technical support is not good, although we actually have to go through our systems integrator (Telus), not directly to SAP/Sybase. However, the feedback from our systems integrator (Telus), is that the technical support is not great. Their first level help desk at SAP/Sybase is generally of no value for the problems we encounter, and the process of escalation to the appropriate level takes longer than it should.

This was our first solution for our enterprise data warehouse project.

The initial setup was complex, because Sybase IQ is architecturally very different from Sybase ASE, which we’ve been using for over 20 years. They share the “Sybase” name, but otherwise are very different products, requiring a different approach to database administration and tuning.

We used our vendor team, whose expertise was acceptable, but not outstanding.

We haven't calculated it.

Caveat emptor. It’s a frustratingly excellent product. When it works, the performance is amazing, but the stability issues, and the expense of the product, coupled with less than top tier technical support, should be considered when evaluating the product for your specific environment.

The column architecture.

Analytical reporting has improved.

Sales and marketing – I just want to elaborate on this a little bit more. The product itself is the best in the industry, which I liked and would like to work with again. IT has a lot less maintenance to support the database and query performance is best; it's very easy to use.

Around 13+ years.

In older version of Sybase IQ we had a few issues, just like any other product, but as the maturity of the product has grown, we have had really good success with this product.

Not in the recent versions of Sybase IQ.

No issues encountered.

Customer service is great, as we have global support for this product from Asia, when we are working nights to fix problems or troubleshoot issues. They are with us all the time and it is a very good transition from US support to Asia and back as we try to solve the problems round the clock.

10/10.

I used Sybase ASE and Microsoft SQL server heavily as Microsoft started off based on Sybase ASE, I was really comfortable with it. In between we tried DB2 and Teradata in different occasions and we went back to Sybase IQ for our operational and Analytical needs

The initial setup at the very beginning of the early versions was a little complex but as time went on, it got better and better and very easy. As a DBA, supporting this system is the best.

All my implementations are in-house for our company and we had group of DBA’s and Unix Administrators who helped us along. Our implementation was on Sun Solaris.

Very high, cost of implementing and maintain is very low and once installed and up and running, things will be just fine.

This product is rightly priced, or even under priced, for what it can do and for sure costs much less than other RDBMS products and licensing. They have more than one model which could fit your organization size and they are more than happy to work with you on this.

• Oracle
• DB2
• Teradata

Come up with clear requirements and a problem statement and see what you are trying to solve with this new implementation. Look beyond current problems by at least three to five years and be proactive and addressing them. You also need your senior management to buy into your approach and budget constraints, otherwise it will be challenging to make it successful.

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

It has provided us with cube query and faster data upload time.

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

We have been using the solution for about 10 years.

Sybase IQ is very stable. However, during earlier stages when the server crashes, you need Sybase technical support to help you out.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The experts on Sybase IQ were very few in number, but they were really knowledgeable.

I guess it is the price competition offered by other vendors that causes companies to migrate to other data warehouse databases.

This is one of the simplest tools to install and it is very easy to scale.

Negotiate based on the features required.

I was not involved with product evaluation. However, this was the tool I normally would recommend for Sybase archive solutions.

Evaluate, carry out benchmarks, and do an ROI before buying.