SAP IQ

Produced by Sybase Inc., now an SAP company, its primary function is to analyze large amounts of data in a low-cost, highly available environment.

At the foundation of SAP IQ lies a column store technology that allows for speed compression and ad-hoc analysis.

[2] By offering the IQ product as part of a collection of related technologies often found in a data warehouse (including Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, Replication Server, PowerDesigner PowerDesigner, and SQL Anywhere), Sybase became one of the first mainstream companies to acknowledge the need for specialized products for the data warehouse market.

[4] In 2014, SAP HANA, together with partners BMMsoft, HP, Intel, NetApp, and Red Hat announced the world's largest data warehouse.

The development and testing of the 12.1PB data warehouse was conducted by the SAP/Intel Petascale lab in Santa Clara, Calif., and audited by InfoSizing, an independent Transaction Processing Council certified auditor.

The downside is that in extreme cases, competition among processors to access a shared pool of storage (usually a storage-area network), can lead to I/O contention, which affects query performance.

Workload balancing is achieved by the SAP IQ query engine through dynamically increasing/decreasing parallelism in response to changes in server activity.

Physical nodes in the Multiplex can be grouped together into “logical servers” which allow workloads to be isolated from each other (for security or resource balancing purposes); machines can be added to these as demand changes.

Page-level snapshot versioning allows concurrent loads and queries, with locking occurring at the table level only.

The bulk loader now performs all operations in parallel to make full use of all server cores, remove bottlenecks, and keep all threads productive, instead of serializing the process.

High Group indexes, which the query optimizer relies on for information about which columns/rows contain which data values, are now structured as a set of tiers, increasing as you move down the pyramid.

SAP IQ offers query APIs based on pure ANSI SQL standards (with few restrictions), that include OLAP and full-text search support.

SAP IQ is an analytics engine that can query both structured and unstructured data and join the results together.

This framework increases SAP IQ's power to do advance processing and analysis as the data does not have to be moved out of the database into a specialized environment for analytics.

Through user defined functions (UDFS) partners can extend the DBMS with custom computations, by providing a specialized statistical and data mining libraries that plug right into SAP IQ to enhance its performance of advanced processing and analysis.

SAP IQ provides several features, both included in the base product and licensable separately, to help protect the security of the user's data.

Storage types, DBSpaces, and lifecycle phases can be defined in an ILM model and the tool can be used to generate reports and create partition creation and movement scripts.

SAP Control Center replaces Sybase Central as a Web-Based graphical tool for administration and monitoring.

SQL queries can call these algorithms, allowing for the execution of in-database analytics, which provides better performance and scalability.

Additionally, Sybase IQ also provides drivers for access via languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby on Rails.

Notable customers include comScore Inc.,[13] CoreLogic, Investment Technology Group (ITG),[14] and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS).