Adaptive Server Enterprise, SQL Anywhere, and Sybase IQ Architectures

Adaptive Server Enterprise, SQL Anywhere, and Sybase IQ are complementary products, with architectures designed to suit their distinct purposes.

Sybase IQ is a high-performance decision-support server designed specifically for data warehousing and analytic processing. SQL Anywhere works well as a workgroup or departmental server requiring little administration, and as a personal database. Adaptive Server Enterprise works well as an enterprise-level server for large databases, with a focus on transaction processing.

This section describes architectural differences among the three products. It also describes the Adaptive Server Enterprise-like tools that Sybase IQ and SQL Anywhere include for compatible database management.

• Servers and Databases
  The relationship between servers and databases is different in Adaptive Server Enterprise from Sybase IQ and SQL Anywhere.
• Space Allocation and Device Management
  Adaptive Server Enterprise, SQL Anywhere and Sybase IQ use different models for managing devices and allocating disk space initially and later, reflecting the different uses for the products.
• System Tables, Catalog Store, and IQ Store
  An IQ database is a joint data store.
• Administrative Roles
  Adaptive Server Enterprise has a more elaborate set of administrative roles than either SQL Anywhere or Sybase IQ.