What is the difference between Sybase ASE and Sybase IQ?

Answer 1

There are two answers to this.

Sybase, or Sybase Incorporated, is a company that makes software products for enterprise systems. The company has two subsidiaries, iAnywhere and Sybase 365, both of which focus on mobility solutions. So when you say "Sybase", you are actually talking about a company.

A lot of people use the term "Sybase" to describe Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, or Sybase ASE. This is similar to saying "Oracle", when you mean "Oracle 10g". ASE is the large scale enterprise database, and competes directly with Oracle 10g and IBM DB2. It is a row based storage RDBMS, suitable for On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) as well as data storage and reporting.

Sybase has three other database products: Sybase IQ, SQL Anywhere, and Advantage. Each is designed for a specific market.

Sybase IQ is an RDBMS which uses a column-based storage system. This means it stores data based the column the data comes from, and not the row the data is associated with.

Column based storage has become a very popular design over the last few years, because it is very efficient at producing reports and can hold a lot of archival data in a much smaller footprint.

Sybase IQ has been around for over 10 years, and is about to hit release 15.0 (sometime in the first half of 2009). This is signifcantly longer than some of it's competitors, who have only just started building column oriented storage systems. For this reason it is very popular for most reporting applications, incuding data warehouses and datamarts.

Sybase IQ uses the same SQL syntax as Sybase ASE, and is fully ANSI SQL compliant. It stores data in tables, the same way as other relational databases. Any application or reporting engine that can run queries against Sybase ASE (or any relational database, for the most part) can use Syabse IQ. The only difference is "under the hood" in the disk storage mechanism.