Exasol vs. SAP IQ

Exasol is suited to applications requiring fewer & larger queries (reporting/data analytics/business intelligence tools). Its per-query overhead makes it unsuitable as an operational database (those are optimized for many & smaller queries.)

Does data compression very well, produces query results very quickly, ability to scale up as data volume/size grow in an organization, row level versioning is in memory and hence the speed. It is a very stable product for large enterprises. More detailed documentation on how to use this product in the initial stages would be really welcome.

Incentivized

• Performance in ELT/ETL transformations
• Analytical queries for ad-hoc reporting
• Python and java code directly in the database near the data!

• Inserting millions of rows of data takes seconds.
• Aggregating billions of rows of data is insanely fast (compared to Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server).

Incentivized

• SaaS offering in Azure
• Upgradability
• Management interface

• The pricing schedule is a bit expensive and cumbersome.
• Licensing for a virtual machine is difficult to understand.

Incentivized

I gave it 9/10 instead of 10/10 only because it lacks in a few advanced enterprise features that require manual workarounds. Otherwise our users have had no problem getting up to speed with it (other than SQL syntax issues that are specific to it, but that's true of any DB)

I have had only positive experiences with their support. They are fast, knowledgeable, and courteous. Online support requests get picked up within hours. I've only once had to use their hotline and that was for an emergency. There was even one minor non-security bug report that I reported and which they fixed in the following week's minor release. I was quite impressed.

SAP IQ support is top-notch. I prefer starting all my SAP IQ support tickets with their Instant Messenger, where the majority of our issues are resolved. If it makes it to their ticketing system, they are very prompt at responding and very knowledgeable in the platform.

Incentivized

Exasol have the best performance by far in analytical queries (DW/BI). Compared to the other database we use much less time on maintenance, actually almost 0 time on indexes distributing data on nodes etc. The system just works out-of-box as long as you have memory enough

SAP IQ is perhaps an under-marketed product in the sense that it is able to scale up very well and perform much faster and more efficiently than other products such as Oracle - when we ran multiple large queries on both Sybase IQ and Oracle, we found that that results were much faster in Sybase IQ and this gave the confidence to go for this product.

Incentivized

• Reduced support needs
• Monetisation
• Huge performance benfits

• The ROI over a number of years has been good. Seeing as how we use it for billing, it has an obvious ROI to us.
• As they have been modifying their licensing structure, it's been difficult to keep up and understand how they work.

Incentivized