SAP AG today announced the availability of SAP Sybase IQ 16 software, a critical component of SAP Real-Time Data Platform. SAP Sybase IQ, the next-generation disk-based column store analytics server delivers speed and power for extreme-scale enterprise data warehousing and “big data” analytics with dramatic affordability and efficiency. With the latest version, SAP further extends an already robust logical data warehouse offering with software that helps organizations extend and exploit the value of big data to achieve insights that were previously almost impossible or impractical. The announcement was made at the TDWI Conference, being held February 17-22 in Las Vegas.

The latest release of SAP Sybase IQ is faster, more secure and more adaptable to changing business requirements. By extending the power of analytics to more people and processes with less effort and expense, SAP Sybase IQ provides the SAP Real-Time Data Platform the ability to turn massive data into actionable insight at the speed of business.

“This latest release of the SAP Sybase IQ product line, now fully integrated into the overall SAP strategic direction, continues the vibrant innovation that has been its hallmark with technology for handling petabyte scale data,” said Carl Olofson of IDC. “One such innovation includes the ability to make new data available as it is ingested so users can query it as it is mapped to columnar structures. This eliminates what had often become a bottleneck in processing large data warehouses. With this capability, SAP Sybase IQ should enable users to take full advantage of the ever-growing volume of new business data.”

SAP Sybase IQ is integral to the company’s data management vision, playing a clear role in the SAP Real-Time Data Platform as the near-line-store to the SAP HANA platform that handles massive amounts of real-time and historical data. In addition, SAP Sybase IQ serves the customer need for extreme-scale enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics in some standalone deployment scenarios.

“SAP Sybase IQ 16 is an important delivery in our vision for a comprehensive real-time data platform and represents the joint innovation and expertise of SAP and Sybase teams,” said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation. “SAP Sybase IQ 16 is integrated with SAP HANA platform and provides flexible and logical data management options to meet unique business and technical requirements. SAP Sybase IQ accommodates mixed workloads and large numbers of concurrent users. The software runs on a wide variety of commodity hardware platforms, supporting lower total ownership costs for companies that rely on data-driven decisions and processes for a competitive edge.”

Exploiting the Value of  Big Data

In order to go from terabytes to petabytes, massive amounts of data must be loaded fast — big volumes equal the need for fast velocity — otherwise systems would be brought to a stand-still. The high-performance data loading, a capability cross-pollinated from SAP HANA in SAP Sybase IQ, ingests large amounts of data faster than ever — petabyte-scale — making big data available to applications and people faster, for in-the-moment decisions. Traditional database systems require significant and time-intensive tuning and optimization to deliver reports and analyses with acceptable performance or specialized hardware platforms that can be difficult or expensive to scale as business requirements evolve. With a column-oriented, expandable grid-based massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, along with patented data compression and indexing technologies, SAP Sybase IQ dynamically manages many analytics workloads in parallel, making it simpler and more cost-effective to support thousands of concurrent users, user-driven reports and ad hoc queries, as well as data-driven processes across the entire enterprise.

Transforming Business Through Deeper Insight

Companies can spot new business opportunities, delight customers and reduce risk with answers to complex questions across years of data at the moment of interaction or transaction. The latest version of SAP Sybase IQ employs an intelligent data affinity approach to track the most optimal data access patterns across the MPP framework to provide dramatic improvements to complex queries on large data sets. In addition, the new row-level versioning (RLV) technology enables customers to ask complicated questions while ingesting large amounts of data from multiple sources, enabling analytics on information when it is needed for improved decision-making.

Enterprise-Ready With Resiliency, Integration and Security

Multiplex resiliency in SAP Sybase IQ helps ensure that enterprise data is always available. Users can get quick answers to any question at interactive speeds by performing deep drill-down analysis on vast amounts of data using standards-based integration to business intelligence (BI) solutions from SAP or other third-party BI tools, without ongoing IT intervention. Big data becomes actionable through multiple integration modes for using MapReduce and Hadoop, in-database mining and portability of models with Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), R language support and an expanded library of statistical algorithms. New data protection features help ensure that enterprise systems are secure and easy to manage.