Database Technology Trends

We are continuing our successful re-launch of the Sybase User Group Tampa Bay Chapter meeting.

Please mark your calendar: Thursday June 16th 2011

Please welcome Chris Brown to Tampa. He will talk about the new Sybase ASE Cluster Edition.

Chris Brown works for Sybase in the Technical Evanglism group, specializing in the Linux Operating System, ASE, ASE Cluster Edition, and at times, Replication Server and OpenSwitch. He has spent most of his professional career working with customers on highly available architectures, and squeezing that last bit of performance out of ASE (and more recently, ASE Cluster Edition).

Please click here to RSVP. The information for the online meeting is inside this RSVP link.

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

In today’s challenging technology environment it is important to keep up the skills and learn new trades along the way. In my opinion there’s no substitute for hands on experience. Step by step instructions are a great way to get hands on experience.

For quite a while I had a couple of Sybase Replication Server step by step instructions on my company’s website ( www.doblerconsulting.com ). Unfortunately these were static pages and nobody could leave any messages. I transferred these pages to a blog format that allows anybody to leave comments, suggestions, feedback and of course, corrections, in case I messed up.

http://www.techtipsntrick.com is the new home for step by step instructions on various technology topics. As I mentioned before, the first few entries are focused around Sybase Replication Server. The basic concept is to provide information on new technology that can be easily reproduced in a test environment. Although these instructions are very detailed, they are for demonstration purposes only.

Here are a few topics that I plan to release soon:

• Step by step installation of Oracle 11g RAC on Red Hat Linux 5
• Step by step installation of Sybase ASE 15 Cluster Edition on SuSe Linux 10
• How to integrate MS SQL Server Reporting Services with SharePoint (MOSS) 2007
• How to activate PDF search in SharePoint (MOSS) 2007
• A collection of hard to find SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 fixes and workarounds (based on lessons I’ve learned with MOSS 2007)
• Sybase Replication Server Expert Tips (a collection of real life Sybase Replication Server how to scripts)

Once I started to post step by step instructions on how to effectively use LinkedIn tools on this blog, I got several requests from readers to write more step by step instructions on a variety of topics. If you have any requests or suggestions on what you like to read about, please leave a comment on this post.

I am looking forward to read your comments, suggestions and critics as well.

Thanks,

Peter