iSys CEO Terry Keene on the Power of Sybase IQ

http://www.sybase.com
If you look inside the financial markets, you'll discover that more money is being made inside the market than outside the market, than with treatment, with customers, with the big retirement funds. Most of the money goes on instant by instant inside the markets. Thats getting done by computers. And you know the problem that the traders inside the markets have is, if they get a millisecond well maybe a ten-millisecond, a fifteen-millisecond or one second advantage over their competitor, they're going to close business before the competitor even sees the trend and that's the challenge. So I don't think you can ever give them enough speed. I dont think you can ever give them enough throughputs. I don't think you can ever give them enough capacity to do anything except continuously push the envelope for the competitive advantage, because that's how fast markets moving.
The biggest problem we have in the data warehouse space, and you can talk different sizes, different kinds, different strategies and different structures, the biggest problem we probably have is when you load up a data warehouse you not only have to load up the data but, you have to load up information about the data, and you have to pre-destine what you are going to ask the data, and you have to pre-structure how you are going to lay out the data so you can get those answers back in a hurry. And the bad part about that is everything you add to the requirements of the data warehouse, you add to the size of the data warehouse. So, you might take, and let me give an example and pick a simpler template, you might add a terabyte baseline data, at least in an original data management system, you put it in a data warehouse and it could wind up being two terabytes, three terabytes of data, once you load it up, you structure it, then you put in tables, then you pre-dispose things like cubes and views and those kinds of things. It just gets bigger and bigger.
SybaseIQ is a column based database. Its extremely fast. Its fast to load, its fast to query, but more importantly it's very, very flexible. The beauty of IQ is because we're only storing columns that we are going to index and query, and because we're not actually storing the actual the data in those columns, we are storing a binary representation of that data. SybaseIQ gets smaller and smaller so we can actually take that terabyte of raw data and squeeze it down to maybe two hundred and fifty gigabytes of real data that we are going to used to query against. That's a three to one savings instead of a three to one growth. Whats really exciting is once you get into that size, and youre doing binary queries on a column basis, boy the response is a lickedy split, we are seeing things like thirty and forty minute queries reducing down to three or four seconds and sometimes even better than that. And its all a function of how that they have structured this data. No better place to bring that value proposition than the financial markets, because they need speed. No question.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Sybase IQ
• petabyte data warehouse
• colum based architecture
• colum based data warehouse
• petabyte database
• terabyte database
• database management system
• Sybase
• iSys