Sybase IQ vs. Sybase vs. Oracle
Kimberly Banks
All -
My company is currently looking at Sybase IQ and Oracle for our data
warehouse. We are a Sybase shop.
Do you have any information about speed differences between the two for
a data warehouse? We are looking at speed for 2 perspectives - speed to
read the data, and speed to completely refresh the data weekly. We
would like to talk to someone who has evaluated Sybase vs. Sybase IQ or
Sybase IQ vs. Oracle.
I would appreciate any information you could help us with.
thanks so much,
Kim Banks
kba...@jcaho.org
Randy Jordan
> would like to talk to someone who has evaluated Sybase vs. Sybase IQ or
> Sybase IQ vs. Oracle.
First off you will need both, Sybase IQ is not a standalone product.
It needs a Sybase SQL-server to run against.
But on the positive side, it's very fast...Oracle doesn't have a leg
to stand on...
RJ
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randy Jordan Senior Systems Analyst
SRI International
(510) 791-9114 (415) 859-4625
rw_j...@mindspring.com rjo...@unix.sri.com
http://www.mindspring.com/~rw_jordan/ http://mis.sri.com/rjordan/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kimberly Banks
All -
My company is currently looking at Sybase IQ and Oracle for our data
warehouse. We are a Sybase shop.
Do you have any information about speed differences between the two for
a data warehouse? We are looking at speed for 2 perspectives - speed to
read the data, and speed to completely refresh the data weekly.
Has anyone done a side-by-side comparison of Sybase vs. Sybaes IQ vs.
Oracle?
Tu Van
Kim,
I'm implemeting an IQ warehouse for my company now. The three keys
about IQ is you need:
lots of memory
lots of disk space
lots of patience
But the performance is incredible. I have not been able to evaluate
the other warehouse solutions but here are some of the things I've
done:
1. Our IQ runs on Solaris 2.5.1 (platform of choice, even though it's
available for HPUX, IBM, and soon to be Dec Alpha and NT). I have 3.5
GB RAM, 1 TB disk spaces (with another TB come in). We need a lot of
disk spaces because we're a Telco company. We're running the latest
version of Sybase 11.0.2.1 and IQ 11.1
2. The reason we're going with IQ mainly because we have a lot of
data (100 Million records a month) and our current report process
takes a few weeks to complete. Right now, we can reduce it down to
within a day and posibbly much better as we tune it.
3. The things that I don't like about it:
can't handle direct update. You have to delete the record and insert
the new one
does not support stored procedure, cursor ,view
very tedious tuning (need a lot of patience). It's very easy to
install and setup the basic environment but tuning takes lots of time
can't select data from IQ back to SQL servver (you can go from SQL
server to IQ only)
it would be wonderful if IQ is integrated within SQL server
Overall, we're very please with it, especially for a young product
like IQ. I think Sybase needs more products like this.
BMReed
Hi Kim,
I have several comments. First of all, Sybase IQ would have to be used in
combination with a regular Sybase SQL Server. The Oracle RDBMS would
be a stand alone product.
Oracle definitely has a much larger share of the data warehouse market,
but
Sybase IQ has had a great deal of success for it's short life.
One thing that Oracle has over Sybase is the ability to do large I/O.
Sybase 11
is capped at 16K, whereas Oracle is limited only by the O/S, which is
currently
64K on almost all platforms. I wouldn't ues anything less than Sybase 11
- you'd
be stuck with 2K I/O. What does this mean? It means that data loads are
going
to be faster with Oracle. There are some things you can do to improve
this
situation, such as using filesystem files rather than raw I/O (I assume
you're
in a UNIX environment), which will take advantage of O/S buffering, in
which
case you'll get up to 64K actual I/O from the O/S. However, Sybase will
still
be doing 16K I/O.
Sybase IQ basically mixes B-tree and bit-mapped indexing strategies, and
has
had great success with retrieval speeds. Oracle 7.3 has incorporated
bit-mapped indexing into their server, although I haven't yet experimented
with
it so I have nothing to say about it's performance. Oracle also has
something
called their Parallel Query Option which does anazing things for really
large
table scans if the table is striped across disks, and there are multiples
processors on the system. If this very specific situation is pertinent to
your
situation, you could gain from that.
Generally speaking, I would say without any kind of benchmarks to support
my opinions that loads will be faster with Oracle, and retrievals faster
with
Sybase/Sybase IQ.
Good luck,
Brenda Muller
Anthony Mandic
Randy Jordan wrote:
> But on the positive side, it's very fast...Oracle doesn't have a leg
> to stand on...
As a rule, slugs generally don't have legs ;-)
But yes, IQ is fast, provided you can throw enough memory
at it. If not, it performs marginally slower, but still
faster than the SQL Server alone. But be warned, even IQ
has its limitations. As of yet, it doesn't handle text.
-am
Lee McGee
Kimberly Banks wrote:
>
> All -
>
> My company is currently looking at Sybase IQ and Oracle for our data
> warehouse. We are a Sybase shop.
>
>
> kba...@jcaho.org
Kim, you need to compare RDBMS to RDBMS and OLAP to OLAP. :^)
Sybase 11 -- Oracle v7 RDBMS
Sybase IQ -- Oracle Express OLAP
Oracle Express is Oracle's OLAP alternative database product, and
is designed to house warehouse tables using a different technical
footing in the same manner as Sybase IQ indexsets. (at least so
I grok from the literature).
Good luck! Lee
--
Lee McGee lmc...@corp.sgi.com
|
(415)933-2403 FAX (415)933-7980 GRUMMAN _|_
http://reality.sgi.com/lmcgee_corp/ AA-5B ____/___\____
"When I fly, I feel an isolation ___________[=o=]___________
extreme and radiant" - Peter Garrison TIGER e/ o \e
Daniel Druker
> Kimberly Banks wrote:
> >
> > All -
> >
> > My company is currently looking at Sybase IQ and Oracle for our data
> > warehouse. We are a Sybase shop.
>
> Kim, you need to compare RDBMS to RDBMS and OLAP to OLAP. :^)
>
> Sybase 11 -- Oracle v7 RDBMS
> Sybase IQ -- Oracle Express OLAP
>
> Oracle Express is Oracle's OLAP alternative database product, and
> is designed to house warehouse tables using a different technical
> footing in the same manner as Sybase IQ indexsets. (at least so
> I grok from the literature).
>
Hi Lee,
FYI Sybase IQ is not an OLAP Server. It is a high performance, specially
indexed RDBMS for fast relational decision support queries.
Oracle Express is an OLAP server. It deals with multidimensional, not
relational, data sets and queries.
An OLAP Server must have a calculation engine, a multidimensional access
manager, an OLAP query language etc.
For example, there is no command to tell Sybase IQ to do a "drill down."
This is the most basic functionality of any OLAP Server.
I don't think Oracle has any product that directly compares to IQ.
Regards,
- Dan
Home: Office:
Daniel Druker Daniel Druker
1427 Byron Street Arbor Software Corporation
Palo Alto, CA, 94301 1344 Crossman Avenue
ddr...@netcom.com Sunnyvale, CA, 94089
(408) 541-4027
ddr...@arborsoft.com
http://www.arborsoft.com
Alan Adelman
IQ is a query acceleration product used to speed up query performance on
large tables frequently used for OLAP. We have it here and have found
the product to have severe limitations (for example, temporary tables
are not supported, you cannot do a select insert into a SQL Server
table, and much more). It is capable, under the right conditions, of
some very impressive query performance, but it is not very flexible.
Additionally, if you are interested in web-enabling your dbms, Sybase
WebSQL does not support IQ. On top of all that, not all OLAP and
query/reporting tools are compatible with IQ (for example, GQL V4.0). I
would not suggest this product unless you already have your dbms
implemented and know the types of queries and access methods used
against it so you can properly evaluate it's compatability with them.