Database Technology Trends

I have the distinct honor to announce that Sybase invited me as a speaker at this year’s TechWave in Las Vegas. This year TechWave will be cohosted with SAP’s TechED. This joined event will attract 5000+ attendees and will draw a lot more attention to the Sybase event.

The topic I will be presenting is the highly charged theme of “Oracle to Sybase Migration”. This is a topic loaded with emotions and opinions. I think it is refreshing that Sybase is acknowledging this topic, as all the other vendors are doing for years. Let’s face it, prior to SAP most, if not all, Sybase migration projects where from Sybase to anywhere else. To me this is a huge showing of confidence from Sybase.

Here’s the official title and description of the session I will present at TechWave:

A Practitioner’s Guide to Successfully Migrate from Oracle to Sybase ASE (Parts 1 & 2)

CIO’s unanimously agree that reducing infrastructure costs is key to ensuring adequate budget investment to achieve top-line business growth.  While there are obviously many approaches to achieving this, one area gaining attention is migrating from the higher cost Oracle database platform to Sybase ASE,  Long known as the highly performant and resilient database powering much of Wall Street, its’ flexibility and low total cost of ownership, both in hardware and administrative costs, are making CIO’s take notice.  This 2-part session will explore this topic from two perspectives.  We will first dive into this topic from the perspective of the business’ "Program Manager" by identifying the major high-level tasks and milestones of a typical project plan as well as quantifying the level of effort and risk for each.  We will then explore this from an implementation perspective looking at some of the most critical and resource-intensive technical aspects of such projects to help you minimize the effort and risk of these types of career-enhancing projects.  If your company is considering its options for a competitive, yet cost-effective, database infrastructure, this is a session you can’t afford to miss.

Please join me at the most exciting TechWave in years. For more information go to:
http://www.sybase.com/techwave

See you there,
Peter

You couldn’t help noticing the huge new Sybase logo “Sybase an SAP Company” towering over the huge conference agenda sign. Just days before the annual Sybase conference, the official announcement of the purchase by SAP was released. Unlike other takeovers, this one is widely viewed as a win-win situation for both SAP and Sybase. SAP gets its own database engine and avoids a hostage situation by Oracle. Sybase, who slowly drifted into irrelevancy, is in the spotlight again. The mood on the floor was very upbeat and the acquisition by SAP was view overwhelmingly positive.

I personally believe that this will not only revive Sybase, but also many independent Sybase consultants, who were forced to pursue different avenues to pay their bills. This was mostly due to the lack of Sybase projects. The only projects that were available were migration projects, from Sybase to something else. The recent uptick in requests for Sybase development resources lets me believe that we are at the beginning of a big turnaround.

With the new owner SAP, many product development roadmaps are changing rapidly. Some of the most apparent changes can be found in Sybase Replication Server.

Sybase Replication Server 15.5 Highlights

• Real-Time Replication into Sybase IQ
• Massive volume OLTP transaction bundling replication (Patent Pending)
• 2 dozen Oracle replication improvements.

Other important new features can be found in Sybase ASE and Sybase IQ:

Sybase ASE Cluster Edition 15.5 Highlights

• Multiple simultaneous failover
• Distributed transaction management 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 Datatypes
• Creating and Managing tempdb Groups

Sybase IQ 15.2 Highlights

• Full text searching
• Large object management enhancements
• CIS performance enhancements
• Microsecond support for date and time functions
• New SQL:2008 OLAP functions
• New time series and forecasting functions
• Command line initialization (iqinit) utility
• Server startup -xd switch
• Thread infrastructure improvements

These are just the latest enhancements of the data management product line of Sybase. If you’re still on a pre 15.x release of any of these products you should seriously consider an upgrade.

As a Sybase System Integrator, Dobler Consulting has the experience and the back-end support from Sybase to tackle even the toughest upgrade projects.

Until next time, thanks for listening,
Peter Dobler