Adaptive Server Enterprise

Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is Sybase Corporation's flagship enterprise-class relational database management system product. ASE is predominantly used on the Unix platform but is also available for Windows.

History

Sybase SQL Server was the name of Sybase Corporation's primary relational database management system product from 1987 to 1995.

It was originally created for UNIX platforms in 1987. In 1988, SQL Server for OS/2 was codeveloped for the PC by Sybase, Microsoft, and Ashton-Tate. Ashton-Tate divested its interest and Microsoft became the lead partner after porting SQL Server to Windows NT.

Microsoft and Sybase sold and supported the product through version 4.21. In 1993 the codevelopment licensing agreement between Microsoft and Sybase ended and the companies parted ways while continuing to develop their respective versions of the database management system.

In 1995, Sybase released SQL Server 11.0. Thereafter, it decided to better differentiate its product from Microsoft SQL Server by renaming it to Adaptive Server Enterprise in versions 11.5 and beyond.

Sybase provides native low-level programming interfaces to its database server which uses a protocol called Tabular Data Stream. Prior to version 10, DBLIB (DataBase LIBrary) was used. Version 10 and onwards uses, CTLIB (Client LIBrary).

Sybase is the leading mobile database vendor. “DUBLIN, Calif. – January 23, 2007 - In a recent report, IDC recognized Sybase iAnywhere as a worldwide leading provider of mobile middleware. The report, Worldwide Mobile Middleware 2006-2010 Forecast and 2005 Vendor Shares (IDC #204829, December 2006), measured iAnywhere's higher revenues and market share-results that placed the company ahead of competitors.” [http://www.ianywhere.com/press_releases/idc_mm.html] Sybase's mobile products include SQL Anywhere, Afaria, and OneBridge.

ASE was called Sybase SQL Server up until version 11.5 released 1996 when it was renamed to differentiate itself with the increasingly successful Microsoft SQL Server product. In 1998, ASE 11.9.2 was rolled out with support for row-level locking and distributed joins and improved SMP performance. ASE 12.0 was released in 1999 providing support for Java, high availability and distributed transaction management. In 2001, ASE 12.5 was released providing features such as dynamic memory allocation and support for XML and SSL among others. Support of an EJB container within the database server along with efficient in-memory connections to the database engine, suggests an object oriented access to the relational data.

In September 2005, Sybase released ASE 15. It includes a rewritten query optimizer that is supposed to increase performance over the traditional optimizer, and support for partitioning table rows in a database across individual disk devices to reduce contention and increase the speed at which the data can be accessed, and "virtual columns" which are computed only when required. Other changes that didn't make it to the initial release but are expected soon are support for column-level encryption, and the ability to mount a database dump as a "virtual database" and extract only the information required. See the online documentation for more details.

The version number was bumped to 15 from 12 because 13 is considered unlucky in Europe, the United States and other "Western" countries, and 14 is considered unlucky in China. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture]

tructure

An ASE installation typically comprises one "dataserver" which hosts several databases. Some of these are "system" databases which store only meta-data used to keep the system operational. The others are "user" databases which store application data in the form of tables and stored procedures. Users can access the data using a login and password. Once logged into a Sybase dataserver a user's access to databases and tables etc is controlled by setting permissions.

ee also

*Sybase
*List of relational database management systems
*Comparison of relational database management systems

External links

* [http://www.sybase.com/ Sybase]
* [http://sybooks.sybase.com/nav/summary.do?prod=9938&lang=en&prodName=Adaptive+Server+Enterprise Sybase ASE online documentation]
* [http://www.petersap.nl Various Documents about ASE]
* [http://www.sypron.nl Rob Verschoor's well known Sybase site]
* [http://www.isug.com/ The International Sybase User Group, an organization whose mission is to represent the interests of Sybase users worldwide.]
* [http://www.sybase.com/products/informationmanagement/adaptiveserverenterprise/lifecycle Product Life Cycle - ASE]
* [http://www.ianywhere.com/products/sql_anywhere.html SQL Anywhere homepage]