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

Keeping up with the news from so many different sources is getting harder and harder these days. That’s why I try to offer a one-stop-shop for your major database vendor news. You get the scoop and if you want to dig deeper, the links are right there. Let’s get started.

Sybase

I am not anticipating any new Sybase ASE version before this summer. None are announced. This is due to the massive efforts of certifying SAP R/3 on Sybase ASE, which is expected by the end of Q2. There were many joined events between SAP and Sybase since Sybase’s acquisition by SAP. The most notable is SAP TechED. The latest was in Berlin and drew a lot of interest, especially into Sybase mobility as well as Sybase IQ and ASE.

This year Sybase TechWave 2011 will be hosted within the SAP TechED USA in Las Vegas. This is the much needed boost for Sybase to a larger audience.

Sybase IQ 15.3 is expected to be released soon. The beta tests are going for quite a while. The highlight for Sybase IQ 15.3 is the PlexQ Distributed Query Platform, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that accelerates highly complex queries by distributing work to many computers in a grid configuration.

Sybase IQ 15.3 PlexQ Distributed Query Platform solution offers the following benefits:

• Extreme performance: enables users to harness the power of multiple compute resources in a Sybase IQ PlexQ environment to simultaneously execute queries across the grid. This is the next step after Sybase IQ 15 introduced multiple writers in the multiplex grid.
• Increased scalability: empowers system managers to easily and cost effectively scale out Sybase IQ PlexQ nodes with commodity hardware and managing SLAs in a high demand environment.
• Architectural flexibility: allows system managers to quickly and easily group subsets of compute resources as logical entities. This allows DBA to effectively utilize workload balancing and resource sharing.

2011 will be a very interesting year for Sybase and as I stated many times before, SAP made all the difference. Sybase is on its way back to gaining market shares as well as market interest.

Click here to read more about Sybase IQ.

Oracle

No, Oracle 12g is not here, yet. There is little or no information available on this topic. The only leaked information so far is that raw devices will no longer be supported. Well, you saw this coming, right? With the maturity of ASM you will probably skip raw devices even sooner.

Let’s focus on the latest release 11g R2. Many of the new features are focused on the cluster.

Single-Instance RAC: This will replace the custom DBSTART scripting DBAs had to do to automatically start all the Oracle instances upon system start. This will implement the restart features every node in a cluster is accustom to.

Cluster Time Synchronization Service: Synchronizing system times across all RAC nodes can be a chore. If you’ve ever experienced a node eviction within a Real Application Cluster database’s cluster configuration, you know how difficult it can be to tie together the train of events that caused the eviction.

ASM: Many new features that offers better support for clusterware.

ACFS: The ASM Clustered File System is the successor of the OCFS and the OCFS2. This allows for better management of the voting disk in a RAC configuration.

Improvements to software installation and patching: The previously standalone Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) is now integrated into the Oracle Universal Installer. Plus there is a new zero-downtime patching for clusterware.

There are several performance improvement features in 11g R2, especially for data warehouse environments.

These include:

• Instance “Caging”
• Automatic Degree of Parallelism
• Parallel Data Cache: In-Memory Execution.
• Faster Refreshes of Materialized Views

Data Guard: New disaster recovery options and better standby database management.

All these improvements and new features are part of the paradigm shift of Oracle that moves the database management closer toward a self-tuning, self-managed and self-healing database system.

Click here to read more about Oracle 11g R2

SQL Server

After 2 releases of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft is releasing the new SQL Server 2011, code name Denali. At a first glance this is a developer’s release. Many new features are geared to better support SQL developers and a better integration into Visual Studio is also a key improvement.

Here are some of the new features:

Multi-Subnet Failover Clustering: This feature allows to geographically separate cluster nodes to provide disaster recovery and high availability. This feature depends on Windows Server failover cluster.

Sequences: Oracle style sequences for unique key value generation. Finally!

Query Paging: This is a feature that MySQL offers for years and now SQL Server is offering as well. Paging through result sets has some distinct performance advantages and simplifies coding efforts for developers.

The most significant change is the drop of DTS package support. This is not actually an announced feature, but an observation within SQL Server Management Studio. The Data Transformation Services menu option under the Legacy section has been removed. I think it is time for the hold outs to convert their old DTS packages to SSIS.

A little side note, SQL Server Management Studio now offers support for multi-screen environments.

Click here to download a trial of SQL Server 2011

Conclusion

Here you have it, a potpourri of new database technologies across vendors and systems. I hope you found something of interest to you and as always, please leave feedback.

Until next time,

Peter Dobler

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