Sybase Inc is quite sold on the concept of the data warehouse, regarded by sceptics as the computing equivalent of the brick privy at the bottom of the garden, and is claiming great things for the IQ Accelerator database query product it picked up with its acquisition of Expressway Technologies Inc in October. IQ Accelerator is claimed to conduct queries across different databases regardless of the hardware or software storing the data and produces instant answers: the company claims that query responses are up to 516 times faster than queries on SQL Server alone and up to 240 times faster than queries on DB2 running on the mainframe. The company is also offering Warehouse Works, a data warehouse package that includes IQ Acclerator. Expressway is seeking a patent for the technology so Sybase would not describe it beyond saying its Bit-Wise indexing technology enables all types of data, including characters and numeric fields, to be represented as bits in a bit-map. Compression enables data to be stored in the index at 50% to 75% of its inflated size. IQ Accelerator accepts queries in an ad hoc or unstructured way, and operates on Oracle Corp, and Informix Software Inc databases as well as Sybase and IBM Corp ones. It is on controlled release as Expressway 111, goes into beta test in the spring and general availability is planned for the summer.
