Sybase has taken the wraps off its release of its Sybase IQ 15.3 beta release. This column-oriented DBMS specifically suited to data warehousing and BI now introduces the PlexQ Distributed Query Platform, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that accelerates highly complex queries by distributing work to many computers in a grid configuration.
Unlike shared-nothing MPP architectures, Sybase claims that PlexQ utilizes a shared-everything approach that dynamically manages and balances query workloads across all the compute nodes in a Sybase IQ MPP configuration. The PlexQ’s "automatic workload rebalancer" works to avoid contention among users for system resources, thereby providing predictable high performance for a spectrum of concurrent workloads.
In theory, this aggressive workload balancing surpasses typical shared-nothing MPP architectures with better concurrency, self-service ad-hoc queries, and independent scale out of compute and storage resources. Sybase states that with this architecture, "PlexQ can exceed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) through simple and flexible resource provisioning that allows nodes to be grouped together as unified images that can be assigned to different application profiles."
Director of analytics product management at Sybase Joydeep Das points out that Sybase IQ 15.3 PlexQ Distributed Query Platform solution offers what the company calls "extreme performance" to enable users to harness the power of multiple compute resources in a Sybase IQ PlexQ environment.
He also claims that this should empower system managers to cost effectively scale out Sybase IQ PlexQ nodes with any popular hardware as user data and query complexities increase. Finally, the platform features more architectural flexibility, which allows system managers to group subsets of compute resources as logical entities to respond to changing user requirements.
