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.

Column-based, petabyte scale, relational database software system used for business intelligence, data warehousing, and data marts.

My client is a into agri business, so it helps them get the best analysis.

Concurrency and functional error messaging.

Five years.

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.

No.

Average.

No.

Straightforward.

Simplify the classification of licenses, especially the core/store number.

SSAS and Oracle.

Make sure you can back it up, load data from a local host and do real load tests. 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-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution.

It's two things:

1. Highest performance on query. This is very notable. Let's say, yesterday I was doing some of the performance improvements on the SAP AC, where the query was running for one and a half hours. I am told the query is a one-store procedure while running for six hours, but in IQ the same thing is running for just four minutes. Also, in AC, if I'm having any raw base of solutions, the data is around 100GB. Yet with IQ's compression it will be 20GB. So, you have all savings on your disk.
2. Your performance is ultimate, and you have a column-based solution to solve all these problems. IQ has its own patented index. It has seven patented indices. It gives you the ultra performance. In the latest version of SAP IQ, you have an in memory solution called RLV (Raw Level Versioning). You can run your query, whatever you are running on the ASP, this will be also be on the IP, so no code changes are required. These are the ultimate performances I have seen on the SAP IQ.

Instead of having a PNO process at the end of the day, which was running forever (six hours) I moved the process into SAP IQ. Now, I am giving real time, or near real time, PNO. The portal runs for four minutes, rather than running for six hours, which is a performance improvement.

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

One of my colleagues was working with Adobe, where the Product Management team was using Hadoop. Hadoop was doing a performance test, let's say excessive performance, and X plus X was the performance improvement of the SAP IQ. Thus, SAP really has to really market this product very well because of its patented indexes. Because it's patented, the compression is even far better than SAP HANA. So, they have to improve it and its use, the RLV in memory solution. The RLV is there so they are currently using it just for keeping delta data. Instead, what I would recommend is, you have to take it into the next level and include it in memory data space and in memory database.

Almost six years.

Very stable. It is an excellent product. We are running it for one of the banks for the last six years. So, in there are the P&L, securities, lending, and borrowing for those business, and we are running it in SAP IQ. No stability issues last I checked.

No issues. It's ultimately a very good product.

Yeah. The support needs much improvement.

I would rate them a six out of 10.

Yeah, I was using a business solution SAP SD. SAP IQ is more powerful than SAP SD, and the customer service has to be much improved. It didn't have the radical help I am looking for nor the documentation.

It's too complex. This is concerning something that will change immediately. I have to search for a very long time to obtain something if I need it. It's like a big dictionary. But, in the end, I don't get anything. If you go to infocenter.sybase.com, there is only a very small search. You have a lot of information, but it's not useful for me. The data coming with the SAP planning portal is not user-friendly. That is one of the major issues, which I'm facing at this point of time.

Yes, definitely. We were evaluating the other products but when I came to SAP IQ, SAP IQ was the first column-based solution across the world. So, we moved to IQ, and IQ gave us the ASE performance. We have faced some issues, a little here and there, but with SAP IQ Information Lifecycle Management, we fixed all those problems, and it's still running and giving business to my bank in last 10 years. We are customers of SAP for this product and still this year we have renewed the product again.

Save for a 100% guarantee, you will get the performance you are looking for with SAP IQ. It is just not for a normal solution, but I recommend it if you have performance issues and you have a huge database of data, for that it is the best product. For these type of issues, I would operate SAP IQ, over even SAP HANA.

I would go for SAP IQ. I am a HANA person, but I will still recommend IQ over HANA.

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.

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.

• 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.

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

Allows creation of highly functional DW.

Concurrency and functional error messaging.

6 years.

No.

No.

Average.

No.

It is straightforward, but the documentation is confusing at times.

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

Yes, Teradata and Oracle.

Make sure you can back it up, load data from local host, and do real load tests.

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.