SAP has launched Sybase ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise) 15.7 service pack 100 (SP100) to provide higher performance and scalability as well as improved monitoring and diagnostic capabilities for very large database environments. “The new release adds features in three areas to drive transactional environments to even more extreme levels. We really see ASE moving increasingly into extreme transactions and to do that we have organized the feature set around the three areas,” said Dan Lahl, vice president, Database Product Marketing, SAP, in an interview with 5 Minute Briefing.
The first area of enhancement is in the new release is around performance in terms of providing increased performance and scalability for very large operational or transactional databases. “We have added enhanced query optimization for handling very large queries, and improved availability and capability for large object handling. The world of RDBMS has to handle structured data but also more and more unstructured or semi-structured data. We have actually re-engineered a large part of the database to better handle lobs from an efficiency and scalability standpoint.” And then finally from a performance standpoint, noted Lahl, 15.7 also recorded leading two-, four- and eight-processor two-tier SD standard application benchmark results for x86 based Linux systems, delivering near-linear scalability from two to eight processor systems. The results achieved on Intel-based Linux servers with leading hardware vendors provide evidence that SAP Sybase ASE can deliver scalable, high-performance databases, not only for SAP Business Suite applications, but also for the most demanding extreme transactional environments.
Second, the new release puts a strong focus on efficiency, said Lahl. “From an efficiency standpoint, we believe that we are improving operational scalability. The database has to be able to scale but it has to be able to do it very efficiently for the enterprise, for the DBA, for the application.” The new release provides the ability to do online index creation, the ability to do incremental back ups, as well as the ability to do incremental reorganization. “And then finally, we have synchronized our releases of ASE and Replication Server so now those are perfectly aligned for doing high availability and disaster recovery which is something that many of our customers have done with those two products and Business Suite customers are going to be doing with ASE and Replication Server as well.” With the synchronized releases, customers don’t have to move up in ASE and six months later move up in Replication Server to get that HA/DR environment, notes Lahl.
And third, in the area of usability, ASE 15.7 adds tools for monitoring and optimizing the database usage, says Lahl. “For example if a database is built out to be 3TB over a number of different physical units but then the usage is really only 1TB, you can shrink the database down from 3TB to 1TB and ASE does that automatically for you and recaptures the space for use by other applications or other instances of databases.” The new release also adds command line restore capabilities so users can do command line restores with the system. In addition, for replication between ASE and Replication Server, there is better Rep agent support within ASE.
For details, go to www54.sap.com/pc/tech/database/software/adaptive-server-enterprise/index.html.