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SAP IQ vs kdb+ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

kdb+
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
39th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP IQ
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of kdb+ is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP IQ is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP IQ2.2%
kdb+0.9%
Other96.9%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Nitin Garg - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President - Financial Services at Evalueserve
An easy-to-deploy solution that can be used for data ingestion and usage
I work for a fintech company where we create several strategies generally built on finance data, which are like one-time series data. We deal with huge bulk data on a daily basis, and we use kdb+ for data ingestion and usage The most valuable feature of kdb+ is the speed at which it returns the…
KK
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Works well with existing platform integration but could improve error messaging and technical support
I do not use SAP IQ's machine learning capabilities. I cannot assess the benefit of SAP IQ's distributed query processing for complex queries, as I am a non-technical operator. I am not sure if we use SAP IQ's data compression features. I think the compression we are doing is on the data storage level and not on the database level. I believe we do not use it, but I'm not certain. We do not utilize SAP IQ's support for unstructured data, as we do not have unstructured data. I do not have any strong opinions on SAP IQ's security features such as data encryption. It's not been something that has been much in focus, neither in our choice of the platform, nor in our daily operations. I guess they're satisfactory as they have not been a problem. I am not aware of the pricing and licensing of SAP IQ, as it's part of a bigger agreement, and I'm not the owner of that agreement. My impression is that SAP IQ is a rather expensive tool in terms of value for money. On a scale of 1-10, I rate SAP IQ a 7.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution returns data quickly, and data retrieval is fast in kdb+."
"It has the best performance in data retrieval compared to other database engines and reduces HW cost, achieving up to 70% less storage; Database is smaller than input data, even with all the indexes."
"Sybase IQ is a column based database, used for business intelligence, data warehousing, and data marts."
"It’s the central component of our enterprise data warehouse."
"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."
"IQ has enabled our company to load data from our data vendors in under one hour and eliminated multiple copies and hours of processing time."
"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."
"The primary benefit of SAP IQ is its ability to limit the expansion of the costly SAP HANA database, which has limited storage capacity. This necessitates a form of data management that involves moving data from SAP HANA to SAP NLS, which is essentially archiving. This allows us to retain access to the data via a link whenever it is required."
"The feature I appreciate the most about SAP IQ is the compression, which is very good; we cannot compare with any other type of EDW."
 

Cons

"The solution should have a more user-friendly user interface."
"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."
"The tool gets stuck sometimes."
"Technical Support: 6/10 because at the time I was using it, Sybase Turkey were short on staff and not very experienced."
"A production database server should never crash in response to user input, but Sybase IQ has repeatedly done that for us, over multiple revisions of the product."
"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."
"Technical support for the product has become almost nonexistent for this product."
"The only negative aspect of IQ is the cost, which can be challenging for companies in Peru."
"The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."
"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."
"Negotiate based on the features required."
"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."
"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."
"Negotiation is very important."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
43%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

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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

UniCredit, AIRBUS
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools. Updated: June 2026.
903,996 professionals have used our research since 2012.