I think for what we use it for, mainly scheduling, forecast and to compare against payroll, it works well. I think there are some other things that could be added to it to use, like more expansive ways to use the forecasting tool and an easier way to pull previous data from prior years. This would help making the forecast for scheduling in the future.
If you are loading massive datasets or aggregating huge relational datasets, SAP IQ is incredible. Loading 10 million rows in seconds is incredibly impressive.
This is an open source software so there are obvious drawbacks, the biggest of which is a lack of documentation.
MonetDB does not seem to be well known outside of the academic environment so there is less information when you are searching for answers of any type.
I'd like to see more use cases and/or best practices so that commercial companies like ours can optimally use all of its highly performant features.
The code is written in C/C++ and this can be negative if you are a mainly java-shop and need UDF - User Defined Function.
SAP IQ support is top-notch. I prefer starting all my SAP IQ support tickets with their Instant Messenger, where the majority of our issues are resolved. If it makes it to their ticketing system, they are very prompt at responding and very knowledgeable in the platform.
There is a plethora of choices when it comes to NoSQL and columnar based databases. We use not one but sometimes 2 or 3 of them to carry out a specific purpose. We chose MonetDB because our engineering team enjoys working with open source software and appreciates its simplicity although becoming familiar with it did take time. I would not deploy MonetDB to production but it's a great backup option.
SAP IQ is perhaps an under-marketed product in the sense that it is able to scale up very well and perform much faster and more efficiently than other products such as Oracle - when we ran multiple large queries on both Sybase IQ and Oracle, we found that that results were much faster in Sybase IQ and this gave the confidence to go for this product.
If you are familiar with a general database concept and played with open source products before then MonetDB will give you immediate return in terms of productivity since developers can quickly develop and verify their test cases involving back-end database with a large sample data set.
There is a stiff learning curve due to lack of documentation and sparse information available on the internet.
Overall experience has been positive since MonetDB gives you another option when it comes to building out a data warehouse.
