No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.
SAP IQ Logo

SAP IQ pros and cons

Vendor: SAP
3.9 out of 5

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.
Get the report

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

SAP IQ offers unbeatable speed and compression with its columnar storage, allowing for high compression, high load rates, and high query performance.
Its column-based technologies are highly valued for fast response time, easy object maintenance, and robust performance for ad hoc data warehouse queries.
SAP IQ limits the expansion of costly SAP HANA databases by providing effective data archiving and management through SAP NLS.
The database is highly scalable, efficient with multiple servers, and allows easy addition of additional servers to the setup.
Data in SAP IQ is fully compressed and indexed for quick transaction execution, enhancing high-performance operations.

CONS

Concurrency and functional error messaging issues are noted.
Multiplex has consistency problems in metadata, leading to potential metadata inconsistency.
Lack of significant development and support from the organization owning SAP IQ.
The high cost of SAP IQ is challenging for companies, particularly in Peru.
Technical support staff appear to lack thorough knowledge of SAP IQ.
 

SAP IQ Pros review quotes

KK
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 21, 2025
SAP IQ is actually quite effective when it comes to scalability; we have a setup that's built with multiple servers involved and that seems to be working fairly efficiently, and if we wanted to add more servers into this entire setup, that would be fairly easy.
AN
Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 29, 2025
The feature I appreciate the most about SAP IQ is the compression, which is very good; we cannot compare with any other type of EDW.
Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Capgemini
May 14, 2024
The initial setup is easy.
Learn what your peers think about SAP IQ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Fredy Alfaro - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Oct 3, 2024
IQ is a very high-performance and high-transaction database.
Mani Velayudhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, SAP Basis at The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company
Mar 1, 2023
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.
Pavankumar Balusupati - PeerSpot reviewer
Member of Technical Staff at HCL Technologies
May 14, 2024
The product is easy to learn.
Fredy Alfaro - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Nov 7, 2024
All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions.
it_user1055472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Snr DBA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jul 29, 2019
Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database.
CN
MSSQL DBA,SAP IQ DBA/ASE at NuWare Systems LLP
Aug 16, 2017
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.
it_user727509 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Aug 29, 2017
The column-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution.
 

SAP IQ Cons review quotes

KK
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 21, 2025
In my interaction with SAP IQ's technical support, the people we are talking to don't know this application very thoroughly.
AN
Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 29, 2025
The downside I see is that it doesn't allow most integrated backups; many of the marketplace players such as NetBackup or Veritas, those software integrated backups are not available.
Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Capgemini
May 14, 2024
There is very little documentation available.
Learn what your peers think about SAP IQ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Fredy Alfaro - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Oct 3, 2024
The only negative aspect of IQ is the cost, which can be challenging for companies in Peru.
Mani Velayudhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, SAP Basis at The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company
Mar 1, 2023
The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better.
Pavankumar Balusupati - PeerSpot reviewer
Member of Technical Staff at HCL Technologies
May 14, 2024
The tool gets stuck sometimes.
Fredy Alfaro - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Nov 7, 2024
The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru.
it_user1055472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Snr DBA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jul 29, 2019
The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future.
CN
MSSQL DBA,SAP IQ DBA/ASE at NuWare Systems LLP
Aug 16, 2017
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.
it_user727509 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Aug 29, 2017
The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised.