March 4, 2008

Odd article on Sybase IQ and columnar systems

Intelligent Enterprise has an article on Sybase IQ and columnar systems that leaves me shaking my head. E.g., it ends by saying Netezza has a columnar architecture (uh, no). It also quotes an IBM exec as saying only 10-20% of what matters in a data warehouse DBMS is performance (already an odd claim), and then has him saying columnar only provides a 10% performance gain (let’s be generous and hope that’s a misquote).

Also from the article — and this part seems more credible — is:

“Sybase IQ revenues were up 70% last year,” said Richard Pledereder, VP of engineering. … Sybase now claims 1,200 Sybase IQ customers. It runs large data warehouses powered by big, multiprocessor servers. Priced at $45,000 per CPU, those IQ customers now account for a significant share of Sybase’s revenues, although the company won’t break down revenues by market segment.

Even if most of them run fairly small data marts, or if multiple departments in the same enterprise are counted, 1200 is a non-trivial figure.

Also quoted in the article is a user who:

has been using IQ for both a 10 Tbyte and a 29-35 Tbyte data warehouse at ComScore for 7.5 years,

There is of course no word on how those figures are measured — i.e., whether they’re user data or something else. Last time I checked, IQ stored all the data, plus a bunch of fairly compact indexes on it.

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Technorati Tags: Sybase IQ, Comscore