No, I did not evaluate other options before choosing this product.

Being in this business for a long time — now as a data architect — I've had the opportunity to use a few solutions and there are many more to research. There is a long list of products that I've worked with and evaluated. You might say that evaluation is constant but I am an expert with SAP IQ. None of the other products have capabilities that would make me suggest a shift.

• Oracle
• PostgreSQL

No, as since we had Sybase ASE we took their IQ product without evaluating any other options.

• Oracle
• DB2
• Teradata

I was not involved with product evaluation. However, this was the tool I normally would recommend for Sybase archive solutions.

Yes, definitely. We were evaluating the other products but when I came to SAP IQ, SAP IQ was the first column-based solution across the world. So, we moved to IQ, and IQ gave us the ASE performance. We have faced some issues, a little here and there, but with SAP IQ Information Lifecycle Management, we fixed all those problems, and it's still running and giving business to my bank in last 10 years. We are customers of SAP for this product and still this year we have renewed the product again.

Caveat emptor. It’s a frustratingly excellent product. When it works, the performance is amazing, but the stability issues, and the expense of the product, coupled with less than top tier technical support, should be considered when evaluating the product for your specific environment.

Yes, Teradata and Oracle.

SSAS and Oracle.