For applications that do not have frequent writes (or updates), the performance of column oriented databases is significantly better. Anecdotally, we recently s

For applications that do not have frequent writes (or updates), the performance of column oriented databases is significantly better. Anecdotally, we recently started using Sybase IQ for an application of this type with a DB of the order of hundreds of Gigabytes and it is an order of magnitude faster than MySQL for the same data. Having said that, I wouldn't say Sybase IQ is as stable as MySQL and we have run into at least a couple of issues, for which patches aren't yet available, that cause intermittent crashes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_IQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_IQ has more details on Sybase IQ.