He couldn’t help but notice the huge new Sybase “Sybase an SAP Company” logo towering over the huge conference agenda sign. Just a few days before Sybase’s annual conference, the official announcement of the purchase by SAP was released. Unlike other acquisitions, this one is widely viewed as a win-win situation for both SAP and Sybase. SAP gets its own database engine and avoids a hosting situation by Oracle. Sybase, which gradually fell into irrelevance, is back in the spotlight. The mood in the room was very upbeat and the acquisition by SAP was seen as overwhelmingly positive.
Personally, I think this will not only revive Sybase, but also many Sybase independent consultants, who were forced to find different avenues to pay their bills. This was mainly due to the lack of Sybase projects. The only projects that were available were migration projects, from Sybase to something else. The recent increase in requests for Sybase development resources leads me to believe that we are at the beginning of a big change.
With the new ownership of SAP, many product development roadmaps are changing rapidly. Some of the most obvious changes can be found in Sybase Replication Server.
Sybase Replication Server 15.5 Highlights
- Real-time replication on Sybase IQ
- Mass Volume OLTP Transaction Pool Replication (Patent Pending)
- 2 dozen improvements to Oracle replication.
Other important new features can be found in Sybase ASE and Sybase IQ:
Highlights of Sybase ASE Cluster Edition 15.5
- Multiple concurrent failover
- Managing Distributed Transactions in the Shared Disk Cluster
Sybase ASE 15.5 Highlights
- In-memory and relaxed-durability databases
- Faster compression for backups
- Incremental data transfer
- bigdatetime and bigtime data types
- Creating and managing tempdb groups
Sybase IQ 15.2 Highlights
- Full text search
- Large object handling improvements
- CIS performance improvements
- Microsecond support for date and time functions
- New SQL:2008 OLAP functions
- New time series and forecasting features
- Command line initialization utility (iqinit)
- -xd server start switch
- Thread infrastructure improvements
These are just the latest enhancements to Sybase’s line of data management products. If you still have a version prior to 15.x of any of these products, you should seriously consider upgrading.
As a Sybase systems integrator, Dobler Consulting has the experience and support of Sybase to tackle even the most difficult upgrade projects.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
Pedro Dobler