Sybase IQ is a highly optimized analytics engine used by over 1,300 companies for business intelligence, advanced analytics, predictive modeling, stringent regulatory compliance, and rapid reporting.
Unlike traditional RDBMSs that were designed to support business transactions, Sybase IQ was architected for reporting and analysis. OLTP-designed RDBMSs require complex, space-consuming indexing and summary tables to perform query-intensive workloads well. These indexes and summary tables actually explode data sizes, often requiring 5 or 10 times more data on the reporting system than the original operational system.
Traditional RDBMS are also more complex to implement for decision support environments. They require more time to load and refresh a reporting system, due to labor-intensive steps of creating backups, tables, and indexes. It also takes a lot of tuning to maintain query performance with a traditional RDBM --diagnosing, testing, and tuning queries over and over again.
