Progress DataDirect and its Performance Advantage
When organizations evaluate data connectivity solutions, performance is often the deciding factor—and that was certainly the case for one of our major direct customers. After choosing to partner with Progress DataDirect last year, they expanded their investment based on the results of a series of rigorous performance tests.
One of their lead evaluators ran extensive benchmarks using the Progress DataDirect SQL Server ODBC 8 driver, installed on a powerful Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server. This wasn’t your average environment, the tests were conducted on a physical machine with 16 cores and 768 GB of memory, ensuring no virtualization overhead skewed the results. SQL Server ran on a separate Windows server, and all queries were run in single-threaded mode to ensure clean, comparable measurements.
The SQL queries used came directly from real workloads at their organization, sourced from their SAS Grid and R environments. Their focus was straightforward: elapsed time to complete large joins—a critical performance metric for data-intensive analytics.
The DataDirect driver was tested alongside Microsoft’s native SQL Server driver and open source. The results spoke for themselves:
Against Microsoft’s driver Progress DataDirect outperformed it across the SAS-based workloads, consistently delivered significantly faster performance on the SAS-based workloads, often doubling the speed or more in many scenarios. On average, the DataDirect connector was over 50% faster.
Against Opensource the Progress DataDirect driver showed even more dramatic performance advantages, ranging close to being 8 times faster. Thus, highlighting its enterprise-grade capabilities
In the R workloads, results were more competitive. Our driver was faster on average, though Microsoft edged ahead in a few individual test runs.
For this Progress DataDirect customer, the SAS Grid workload was the priority, and that’s exactly where our driver delivered the greatest gains. It’s one thing to claim performance leadership, it’s another to prove it with real-world data.
Were such performance advantages only found in this use case?
The quick answer, no. Progress DataDirect offers a significant performance advantage for enterprises working with high-volume, complex data environments. Designed for speed, scalability, and reliability, DataDirect connectors are optimized at the wire protocol level, reducing latency and maximizing throughput across diverse data sources—including cloud databases, big data platforms, and traditional RDBMS.
A key differentiator is DataDirect intelligent caching, load balancing, and connection pooling, which dramatically reduce query response times and improve concurrency under heavy workloads. DataDirect also minimizes CPU and memory usage on client machines, making it ideal for performance-critical applications like analytics, business intelligence, and data integration.
Whether you’re accessing data on-prem, across hybrid systems, or in the cloud, DataDirect delivers the performance edge needed to power modern, data-driven decision-making.
Want to see what the results will be in your own environment? Learn more about our ODBC drivers or contact us to run your own benchmarks. Click here.
Todd Wright
Todd Wright leads Global Product Marketing for OpenEdge and DataDirect solutions from Progress. He works closely with the product management and sales organizations to create and promote materials that are relevant and valuable to Progress customers. He is instrumental in developing customer relationships and creating strategic marketing plans that drive awareness, consideration, education and demand for Progress.
