Database Technology Trends

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

It’s been a while since I last wrote in my blog. Luckily Google does its magic and still sends visitors to my blog.

This post will be very brief. Recently I was contacted by Sybase to write a couple of articles exclusively for Sybase. I agreed to this and that’s another reason why my blog got neglected.

The first article I wrote was called “Sybase ASE 15.5 – The Need For Speed” and was published in the Database Journal May 26th 2010. Please follow the link below to read the article.

http://www.databasejournal.com/features/sybase/article.php/3883951/Sybase-ASE-155—-The-Need-for-Speed.htm

The second article was on the topic of Semantic Partitions in Sybase ASE. This article was published on Sybase’sweb site as featured article for the month of June.

http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1080387

I hope you enjoyed the articles and if you want more information about me and my company Dobler Consulting, visit the website http://www.doblerconsulting.com and sign up for the news letter.

Thanks for listening,

Peter

As Managing Partner of Dynamic Database Solutions, LLC, I am proud to share a special announcement with you. Dynamic DB is currently launching the ActiveBase software suite into the US market. My goal is to introduce you to new database technology and trends, and ActiveBase is definitely a new technology you should take a closer look at.

Below is the press release about ActiveBase’s inclusion into Gartner’s Cool Vendor list 2010.

ActiveBase, a pioneer in the Dynamic Data Masking market through its ActiveBase Security™ solution, today announced it has been included in the list of Gartner Cool Vendors in the Cool Vendors in Application Security, 2010 report by Ray Wagner, Joseph Feiman, Neil MacDonald, John Pescatore, Earl Perkins April 14, 2010, by Gartner Inc.

While other security and static data masking tools may provide protection for non-production environments, sensitive information in production environments remains mainly unprotected. With ActiveBase, users, external workforce, IT support teams or outsourced personnel cannot access sensitive information if it is not required to perform their job. ActiveBase offers a new approach – Dynamic Data Masking – allowing for application transparent, flexible protection even within packaged applications.

ActiveBase Security™ is the first product on the market in the emerging Dynamic Data Masking market. Static data masking — the only approach offered by most vendors — primarily aims to deter the misuse of data by users of test databases (typically programmers, testers and database administrators) by masking data in advance of testing.

Dynamic (real-time) data masking typically masks data in production databases (for example, from client service personnel working in credit-card call centers).

This technology does not require any changes in applications that access the database, or to the database itself. A caching mechanism minimizes performance effects.

The power of Dynamic Data Masking solution is that it adds a security layer within and around  business applications, reporting, development and database tools, masking, scrambling, hiding or blocking sensitive information in real-time with no changes to applications or databases, while the underlying data is not masked, but it is returned masked at the presentation layer.

ActiveBase Security™ benefits include:

• Dynamically masks, scrambles, blocks, encrypts or hides “in-motion” access to sensitive and personal information in 1/10 the costs and time of applying other solutions.
• Enforces application security policies across applications and tools accessing production database. No need for changes to the applications or the database.
• Reuses ActiveBase Security production rules to mask and protect unauthorized access in testing and QA environments.
• Administered by security operators that are not required to be DBAs.

About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

About ActiveBase

ActiveBase, Ltd. is a pioneer in the Dynamic Data Masking market through its ActiveBase Security™ solution and performance suite. World leading customers including Coca Cola, GE, Orange, Phoenix Insurance, First international Bank, Israeli Security agency and many more trust our software products in the most demanding environments.

Our software products are built on a patented Database Network Router (DNR) technology, transparently installed between applications and databases, with database traffic routed through it.

ActiveBase was founded 2002 by senior IT industry executives with specific expertise in enterprise security and database performance. ActiveBase is privately held. For more information, please visit http://www.active-base.com or http://www.dynamicdatamasking.com 

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More information about ActiveBase can be found on http://www.dynamic-db.com and http://www.doblerconsulting.com .

Thank you for reading,

Peter Dobler