Sybase IQ indexes offer these benefits over traditional indexing techniques:
Index sizes remain small. The entire database can be fully indexed and made available for ad hoc queries in the same space that would be needed to store the raw data. Most traditional databases need three times as much space.
Queries are resolved by efficiently combining and manipulating indexes on only the relevant columns. This avoids time-consuming table scans.
I/O is minimized, eliminating potential bottlenecks.
Because indexes are compact, more data can be kept in memory for subsequent queries, thereby speeding throughput on iterative analysis.
Tuning is data-dependent, allowing data to be optimized once for any number of ad hoc queries.