ASE 15 addresses the need for database speed

ASE 15 introduces some data engine enhancements that will probably be invisible to end users but will make admins very happy. One of my personal favorites is the new unsigned integer support, which gives you the ability to store all integers as positive numbers instead of a range of negative to positive.

Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld Sybase ASE 15 Enterprise Edition Sybase, sybase.com Very Good  8.4 criteria score weight Manageability 8 25% Performance 8 25% Availability 9 20% Scalability 9 20% Value 8 10% Cost: Starts at $2,995 per server, $595 per seat, or $24,995 per CPU Platforms: Solaris/Sparc, IBM AIX, HP-UX/HPPA, Windows/x86, Linux/x86 Bottom Line: Sybase ASE 15 offers significant performance improvements over earlier versions. With partitioning, materialized computer columns and function-based indexes, ASE shops will definitely notice the difference in speed. Advances made to the data engine improve ASE’s support, but the much-touted native encryption hasn’t actually been implemented in this release, so users will have to wait for that feature. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

This support can be quite significant if you have an application that uses an auto-increment column that’s running out of range values. Previously, the only solution was to increase the size of the datatype, but that also increases the storage requirement. ASE’s unsigned support doesn’t affect the storage requirement at all.

ASE 15 also exponentially increases the maximum size of your data. Before, the total size of the data on your server could only be 8TB, but the new architecture allows you to create up to 2,147,483,647 disk devices, each of which can be as large as 4TB.

Leading or following?

So where does this put ASE globally? Well, in some places it’s slightly ahead of other vendors, and in others it’s finally catching up -- but there are a few spots where it’s still behind the curve.

The new parallelism and function-based indexes put ASE only slightly ahead of its competitors because not every type of query will benefit from the index. It’s highly possible that you’ll implement a function-based query and see little to no improvement. (Of course, it’s also possible that you’ll get a sizeable improvement.)

Sybase’s marketing machine touts ASE 15’s built-in encryption, a feature none of the other vendors have yet. The built-in encryption will allow you to encrypt column-level data without writing any code; all you do is define the column as encrypted. This is the same way third-party products such as DbEncrypt work.

Although Sybase is correct in saying that none of their competitors have this functionality yet, technically, neither does Sybase. The underlying framework for the built-in encryption is the only thing that made it to ASE 15; the actual functionality won’t be available until 2006.

ASE does, however, include “big int” support in this release. Big ints are exact numbers that range from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to +9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (or 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 if using the new unsigned support). They’re important for storing very large number representations, and are often used as auto-increment columns to keep ordered surrogate keys. Other databases such as SQL Server 2000 have had this capability for years, so it’s good to see Sybase catching up.

ASE has made some improvements to its Interactive SQL development tool, but its capabilities still barely exceed those of Notepad. I also feel Sybase remains a bit behind in security: ASE 15 still installs with its main admin account “sa” with a null password, so any ASE server is exposed on initial install until this is changed.

Nevertheless, ASE 15 is a good release. Sybase put in a lot of work on the query processor, and the partitioning, parallelism, increased data support, and unsigned integer support are nice features. ASE 15 is a good prospect for the Sybase world, but it won’t be making many waves in any other pools.