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CockroachDB vs SAP IQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
CockroachDB's serverless model provides cost-effective, versatile cloud solutions, offering significant savings and operational advantages over separate environments.
Sentiment score
6.2
SAP IQ boasts high ROI with substantial hardware savings, low maintenance costs, though some users lack authorization to confirm it.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.0
CockroachDB customer service is mixed; technical support quality varies, with users praising the AI chatbot, but responsiveness needs improvement.
Sentiment score
5.6
Customer service is 24/7 but varies in quality; technical support lacks experts, causing slow escalation and limited advanced assistance.
The issue was resolved efficiently.
It seems very difficult to get proper advanced assistance on advanced or complicated problems.
The quality of support from SAP is very good; if it's a known problem, they will have a knowledge base, so we will get immediate assistance.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
CockroachDB excels in scalability and resource management, praised for seamless scaling from small to large, supporting diverse needs efficiently.
Sentiment score
7.4
SAP IQ offers scalable solutions with Simplex and Multiplex architectures, accommodating vast data volumes across PCs or servers.
We can span the read and write load into multiple nodes, and that scalability is there.
If we wanted to add more servers into this entire setup, that would be fairly easy, so it's rather good when it comes to scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
CockroachDB is stable overall, highly rated for reliability but faces challenges with protocol issues and large, complex workloads.
Sentiment score
6.0
SAP IQ is stable, effectively managing complex transactions despite occasional issues, making it a reliable choice for implementations.
It's usually something external, such as lack of disk space or problems arising from the integration to other systems.
 

Room For Improvement

CockroachDB requires improvements in documentation, compatibility, UI features, disaster recovery, latency optimization, integration, and cost efficiency for global deployment.
SAP IQ faces challenges with high costs, inadequate training, stability issues, and integration limitations, impacting performance and adoption.
For multi-region deployment, CockroachDB requires at least three plus replicas across data centers to achieve strong consistency across regions, which increases infrastructure costs including compute, storage, and networking.
It is easy to deploy SAP IQ; the implementation and installation are easy.
When there is an issue, the error messaging we get is not always sufficient to do a fast and solid fix.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find CockroachDB affordable and reliable, with flexible pricing options appealing despite some perceiving high costs.
SAP IQ is cost-effective with various licensing models, though price understanding and negotiation are essential for optimal implementation.
 

Valuable Features

CockroachDB provides easy setup, fault tolerance, scalability, and security, while supporting PostgreSQL compatibility for optimal performance across regions.
SAP IQ features column-based architecture, high compression, rapid queries, large-scale data handling, and integration with SAP BusinessObjects.
CockroachDB's geo-distribution feature is superior to traditional databases.
We can get historical data quickly, and you can fetch information very quickly because every column is indexed.
The most valuable feature of SAP IQ for us is that it works very effectively with the SAP BusinessObjects which we use it with.
 

Categories and Ranking

CockroachDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP IQ
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
26th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of CockroachDB is 4.1%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP IQ is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
CockroachDB4.1%
SAP IQ1.0%
Other94.9%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Tringali - PeerSpot reviewer
Open source with extensive documentation and a University for training
I am a freelancer. A client of mine wanted a solution that would allow them to scale yet not abandon the familiar PostgreSQL front-end (and rewrite a part of their source code). Scalability aside, CockroachDB is a fine way forward from PostgreSQL and is not changing the client source code part of the system. If you are lucky and you do not use newer features from recent versions of PostgreSQL or PostgreSQL extensions, it's fine. There are nice-to-have features for big organizations like regional tables. At the moment, my client simply does not use these. However, the serverless offer from CockroachDB is reacting well as data grows.
Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation
I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CockroachDB?
The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported.
What needs improvement with CockroachDB?
The platform should provide a UI feature where users have the ability to manage it. The CockroachDB platform should have a chatbot where users can inquire about pricing or seek solutions for querie...
What is your primary use case for CockroachDB?
We have been using CockroachDB for the last two years. From 2023, we started working on a product similar to Google Capture. We decided to work with CockroachDB with Hasura. Hasura is a UI for the ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Sybase IQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Baidu, Kindred, Tierion, Heroic Labs, Gorgias
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about CockroachDB vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.