August 26, 2011

Virtual data marts in Sybase IQ

I made a few remarks about Sybase IQ 15.3 when it became generally available in July. Now that I’ve had a current briefing, I’ll make a few more.

The key enhancement in Sybase IQ 15.3 is distributed query — what others might call parallel query — aka PlexQ. A Sybase IQ query can now be distributed among many nodes, all talking to the same SAN (Storage-Area Network). Any Sybase IQ node can take the responsibility of being the “leader” for that particular query.

In itself, this isn’t that impressive; all the same things could have been said about pre-Exadata Oracle.* But PlexQ goes somewhat further than just removing a bottleneck from Sybase IQ. Notably, Sybase has rolled out a virtual data mart capability. Highlights of the Sybase IQ virtual data mart story include:  

*Of course, as a robust columnar DBMS, Sybase IQ lacks the fatal data warehousing drawbacks of pre-Exadata Oracle: I/O limitations, and the unnatural acts of database administration they induce.

Sybase is also proud of the elasticity of its new architecture, but seems no more able than I to come up with a use case in which anybody would much care.

Comments

One Response to “Virtual data marts in Sybase IQ”

  1. Dan Lahl on August 29th, 2011 9:19 am

    Thx for the post Curt…

    We at Sybase have found that our Sybase IQ 15.3 beta customers – who wanted to be in the program for 15.3’s distributed query capabilities – found that the logical server feature (system elasticity) was a capability they were very excited about indeed. Clearly our customers care, primarily some of our beta testers who sell information for a living.

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