Sybase, the enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information, announced that the Sybase IQ analytics server has set a new Guinness World Record by powering the world’s largest data warehouse on a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server. This accomplishment was achieved using Sybase IQ, BMMsoft ServerSM and the Sun Microsystems Data Warehouse Reference Architecture. This winning combination enables more data to be stored in less space, searched and analyzed in less time, while consuming 91 percent less energy and generating less heat and carbon dioxide than conventional solutions.

Powered by the category-leading column-oriented database Sybase IQ, the data warehouse is certified to support a record-breaking one petabyte of mixed relational and unstructured data—more than 34 times larger than the largest industry standard benchmark and twice the size of the largest commercial data warehouse known to date. In total, the data warehouse contains six trillion rows of transactional data and more than 185 million content-searchable documents, such as emails, reports, spreadsheets and other multimedia objects.

Guinness World Records judge Danny Girton presided over the certificate ceremony in New York to validate the record and confirm that the achievement met the criteria set forth by the organization. “We applaud Sybase, Sun and BMMsoft for their entry into the Guinness Book of World Records for the World’s Largest Data Warehouse,” Girton said. “We congratulate everyone involved in this record-breaking achievement.”

Designed from the ground up as an analytics server, Sybase IQ produces its impressive results because of a unique architecture combining a column-oriented data structure with patented indexing and a scalable grid. Sybase IQ offers extraordinarily high performance at a lower cost than a traditional, row-oriented database. And, unlike traditional row-based data warehouses, the stored data in Sybase IQ is compressed by up to 70 percent of its input size, creating the most optimal and elegant analytics solutions.

“The results of this benchmark showcase Sybase IQ’s capabilities to handle real-world scenarios, querying vast amounts of data representing the transactions processed across the worldwide financial trading networks over multiple years.” said Francois Raab, president, InfoSizing, the consulting firm that oversaw the benchmarking of the record. “Sybase IQ has proven its production strength in handling the volume of multimedia documents representative of the electronic communication between half a million financial traders.”

“This record truly demonstrates Sybase’s vision to the future about what kinds of extreme analytics and volumes of data customers will be facing in the coming years,” said Kathleen Schaub, vice president of marketing, Sybase. “Sybase IQ allows users to manage immense data stores and accelerates analytics processing up to 100 times faster than traditional solutions. It comes as no surprise that combining its power with BMMSoft server and the innovative Sun server and storage products would deliver an industry-leading, and now record-breaking, energy efficient data warehouse.”

“Sun’s SPARC Enterprise servers are the workhorses of the datacenter, ably handling mission-critical applications including ERP, BIDW and large-scale OLTP,” said Bob McGaughey, senior director, Enterprise Servers, Sun Microsystems. “The Guinness World Record proves that Sun’s data warehouse solution delivers advanced virtualization and consolidation capabilities with the extreme scalability and efficiency to handle the most demanding enterprise workloads.”

View the Guinness certificate ceremony in New York