Sybase IQ is a relational database software system used for business intelligence and data warehousing, produced by Sybase, Inc..
Contents |
Features
As a column-oriented DBMS, Sybase IQ stores data tables as sections of columns of data rather than as rows of data. This has a number of advantages; if a search is being done for items matching a particular value in a column of data, only the storage objects corresponding to that data column within the table need to be accessed. A traditional row-based database would have to read the whole table top to bottom.
Additionally, the column-based storage enables IQ to compress data efficiently on the fly; as each column is made up of a number of records of the same data type and size, compression can be very efficient and rapid. [1]
In July 2007, at Sun Microsystem's request, InfoSizing verified the population and performance[2] of the world's largest data warehouse implemented in history; consisting of over one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of structured and unstructured data, designed and implemented by BMMSoft using Solaris 10 OS and Sybase IQ. Sun Microsystems and Sybase claim that the system architecture used in this benchmark is highly efficient, yielding a reduction in equipment and processing needed and thus a reduction in energy consumption[3][4].
Since databases with limited domains (e.g., one that contains state names like VA, MD, WV, NJ, etc.) and high row counts are incidentally compressed by storage in column form (as only one example of each value in the domain is stored), those types of databases can be stored using less space than those employing more traditional row storage. Sybase claimed that in the case of the BMMSoft data warehouse, their one petabyte of raw transactional data (or 500 terabytes of transactional and 72 terabytes of multimedia) was represented using only 260 terabytes of storage.
Operating System Compatibility
Sybase IQ has been certified on:
- Sun Solaris 64 bit
- Red Hat Linux 64/32 bit
- SuSE Linux 64/32 bit
- HP-UX 64 bit
- HP-UX Itanium 64 bit
- IBM-AIX 64 bit
- Windows 64/32 bit
Customers
Sybase IQ currently has more than 1500 customers and 3000+ installations worldwide. Sybase IQ is supporting thousands of users concurrently in analytics and data warehousing environments.
Criticisms
Sybase IQ is optimized for data warehouse type applications, where data is added to databases but typically not modified much if at all, and the typical access is to search through the data. The column based storage which enables good performance for reading through data somewhat slows down writing data (instead of just the last data object requiring updating with a row object, one data object per table column must be updated). Large volume data imports can still be reasonably efficient. Performance in a transactional environment, where row records are accessed and updated regularly, is significantly worse than competing transactional row-based relational databases.
Prior to version 15, Sybase IQ didn’t have automatic queues for requests of changing its objects, like other RDBMSes (SQL Server, Oracle, ASE, ASA, MYSQL, DB2, etc) do. Therefore, a DDL/DML statement may return an error if the target object is in use. Sybase IQ provides explicit lock table statement support that will allow behavior similar to traditional RDBMS, although the locking scheme is less granular.[5] Since version 15, this behavior is configurable. A DDL/DML operation can wait until other active operations on the same object are complete.
External links
References
- ^ http://www.sybase.com/content/1035804/SybaseIQ-12.7-010407-wp.pdf accessed September 11, 2007
- ^ http://www.sun.com/service/refarch/datawarehouse/Ready-Time-Report_R1.2.pdf | Sun-Sybase-BMSoft solution Auditing
- ^ http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1054047 | Sybase IQ Powers World's Largest Green Data Warehouse Including Unstructured Data
- ^ http://www.sun.com/service/refarch/datawarehouse/WLDWSolutionBrief.pdf | World's Largest Data Warehouse Solution Brief
- ^ http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1056545
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
