The latest Gartner Magic Quadrants for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, Business Intelligence Platforms, CPM Suites have been released. You can find them respectively, here, here, and here. I don't have too much to say about these. Curt Monash has some interesting comments here and here. For the most part, I agree with Curt. These reports are interesting but not always reflective of what is happening in real world implementations.
For example, Sybase is ranked only slighly above HP in ability to execute, yet Sybase has about 1500 Sybase IQ customers and HP might have as many as 30 Neoview customers. And how many of those are in production? Maybe, none of them are.
Yes, Sybase IQ and HP Neoview are two different products with different strategies and target markets. That is exacltly the point. If you only looked at the MQ, then you would think these two products are close, but there would be nothing further from the truth.
Perhaps it is just me, but Sybase has to be one of the most underrated companies in the data management industry. I know Sybase has a fairly large install base, and there is a niche of Sybase fans. However, few companies that have such a large following seem so obscure.
Adaptive Server Enterprise
Sybase was founded in 1984 as Systemware. In 1988, Sybase partnered with Microsoft to port its SQL Server database to Windows and OS/2. Sybase sold its product as Sybase SQL Server, and Microsoft sold the OS/2 version under the name Microsoft SQL Server. In 1993, Sybase ended the agreement after a dispute with Microsoft over royalties. Microsoft struck a deal to keep the windows code base, and the two companies went their separate ways. Depending on who you talk to, Microsoft either struck a great deal, or Sybase got robbed. Sybase soon changed the name to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise to distinguish it from the Microsoft product. While the two products have evolved, much about the products still resemble each other today.
Over the years, Sybase has built a highly respectable suite of data
management tools, but it has never had the marketing prowess of the
other big vendors in the industry. Sybase ASE competed heavily with Oracle and Informix through the 90's to become the leading OLTP database vendor. The company gained a niche in certain industries, but it has never rose to the prominence that Oracle and DB2 share today. Still, Sybase ASE has an install base of more than 20,000 customers.
SQLAnywhere
SQLAnywhere began its life as Watcom SQL in 1992. Watcom was acquired by Powersoft in 1994, and Powersoft was acquired by Sybase a year later. Sybase renamed the product to SQL Anywhere. Today, SQLAnywhere is marketed by a Sybase subsidiary, iAnywhere. SQLAnywhere is embedded into many applications, such as Quickbooks. As well, it known for being a leading database solution for mobile technology. An ultralite version runs on mobile platforms, such as Palm, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. SQL Anywhere, though not necessarily a large scale workhorse database is simple and intuitive and one of the easiests databases to use on the market.
Sybase IQ
Data warehouse professionals have probably heard of Sybase IQ at some point, even if they know little about it. Sybase IQ emerged as an optional engine for Sybase 11 in 1996. Sybase had acquired bit-wise indexing technology in 1994, and put this to work in IQ. However, there was something else that was very different about IQ. Rather than storing data to disk by rows, they used column orientation. This means that the data is literally stored on the disk by columns.
Column oriented storage provides significant performance improvements for queries that involve grouping by columns. It also allows additional compression algorithims that make significant reductions in storage space. (I will write more about column stores in a future blog post.)
For many years, Sybase IQ was the only significant column store DBMS on the market. More recently, vendors, such as ParAccel and Vertica, have used column orientation and are finding success with it. Sybase IQ has made a signifcant niche for itself in the data warehousing market with very little fanfare. For all its notoriety, Teradata has an install base of about 1000 customers. That's nothing to laugh at for the company that many consider to have created the data warehouse industry. Sybase IQ has about 1500 customers.
At various times, Sybase IQ has set benchmark records on the TPC-H. In 2007, Sybase announced that it had built the world's largest data warehouses in the lab. It loaded more than 1 Petabyte of raw transactional data. It took 3 weeks to load, but only filled 260 Terabytes of actual disk space due to compression.
Is Sybase IQ the best data warehouse platform for every situation? No, columnar databases don't work at all for transactional workloads. Often, there is a performance penalty on the loading end, though this has improved somewhat in recent years. In addition, columnar databases work well for certain types of queries, but not so well for others. The important thing is to know your user requirements and use cases.
Sybase software is well respected and has a large install base. Though they may not receive much press or marketing as other companies in the space, Sybase deserves consideration if you are in the market for a DBMS.
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