Several times over the past few months, I have been asked about “Sybase scalability” vis-à-vis using locking vs. versioning ala Oracle. It appears that lacking any real innovation over the past years, when Sybase didn’t die in 2002 after Larry Ellison’s premature pronouncement of our death, Oracle sales reps have dug out their tired old argument about “readers and writers” and that versioning in somehow superior to locking for concurrency control – betting that the average Sybase DBA just doesn’t know how to put them in their place……and rightfully so as Sybase doesn’t give its customers the facts to fight this FUD. I even had to come in (much too late) on a “customer benchmark” in which Oracle 11g supposedly trounced ASE 15 due to MVCC vs. locking – when no one even bothered to capture the wait statistics to see if locking was even a consideration. The reality was that some poor JDBC defaults and some lack of ingenuity were likely the real culprits – and not a “lack of scalability due to locking”.
So let’s get right down to it. (more…)

I wanted to put an introduction post together so everyone reading this blog will know about what we will talk about here.

If you goto the database management link at sybase.com, there is a complete list of all the topics that could be covered here, but this blog will not cover that complete list. The focus here is the enterprise database customers that use Sybase ASE, Replication Server, Sybase ASE Cluster Edition and those technologies that support the solutions within that product set.

This statement does open the door for some higher level solution discussions, but they will always come back to how our enterprise customers leverage large amounts of information in operational systems. We will also put up some annoucements for events, new releases, and even some newsgroup posts that deserve a wider audience, so let us know what you would like to hear about by commenting on this post.

Thank You