Case Study: Daman achieves 5× faster reporting, 64% faster queries, and 85% data compression with Microsoft Azure (SQL Server 2016)

Daman speeds business insight by 5X and improves agility by migrating from Sybase IQ to SQL Server 2016

Daman, the UAE’s leading national health insurer serving more than 2.8 million members, faced slow and unscalable analytics from a Sybase IQ data warehouse: complex weekly reports took 28 hours and monthly reports up to 48 hours, and tighter access control would have cost an estimated $250,000 to integrate. With over 3 TB of service data and growing analytical needs, the company needed much faster insight and better security without fragmenting its granular datasets.

Working with partner D | ONE, Daman migrated its warehouse to Microsoft SQL Server 2016 using clustered in-memory Columnstore indexes and Always On availability on commodity hardware. The move delivered dramatic gains—simple queries dropped from ~20s to 3s, weekly reports from 28h to 10h (64% faster) and monthly reports from 48h to 10h (5x faster)—while Columnstore compression cut storage footprint by about 85% and integration with Active Directory eliminated the $250K cost, improving security and enabling faster, more detailed analytics for fraud detection and provider management.

Daman

Peter Bauer

Chief Information Officer