Migrating an ASE server or ASE database to a different platform has become more common over the years with the growing popularity of platforms like Linux and Solaris/Intel. However, cross-platform migration has always presented some hurdles to DBAs.

Prior to ASE 12.5.3, the only way to do this was by recreating the schema, followed by copying the data through bcp or CIS (i.e. proxy tables). Prior to 12.5.3, it was not possible to load database dumps created on a different platform (well, formally speaking that was the situation. In practice, it might actually work if both platforms were using a CPU with the same Endian-ness (i.e. Big or Little Endian); however, Sybase did not formally support cross-platform loading of database dumps in those days).

Life got better with version 12.5.3, when ASE was extended with support for cross-platform loading of database dumps. (more…)

Last month, I gave a talk at SYS-CON’s Virtualization and Cloud Computing Conference in New York which was titled “Virtualizing Resources in Production Databases – It takes more than hardware and a virtual machine to exceed SLAs!” First, my hat’s off to the conference organizers who, despite the poor economy and general doom and gloom on Wall Street these days, managed to pack the halls. It was nice to see an enthusiastic mob of technologists congregating in places other than data centers or bars! So for my first post on this blog, I wanted to share a little of my thinking around this area of virtualization which, as the title suggests, might appear controversial to some …
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So another irritating question that often gets asked – and answered incorrectly by all the self-appointed web gurus/trolls that lurk on the newsgroups is “Which is faster – APL or DOL locking?” Being the usual frustrating person I am, I typically answer initial questions with a question of my own – “Faster at what?” Usually the stock answer from anybody who really knows what they are doing is “It depends” – but my way of answering is intended to get the person to maybe think a little bit about why they are asking the question in the first place – which is the key to the whole point.
The problem is that when the question is asked to Sybase engineering, you need to understand the context in which they are replying are from a internals locking overhead and not necessarily the fastest for throughput or response time – and hence the recommendations in the Sybase manuals to use datapage locking. Locking in Sybase is implemented using a lock hashtable and a simple serial lock chain. (more…)

I thought I’d take a few minutes and do some more shameless self-promotion

Next Thursday, May 21st at 1:00PM Eastern Time, I’ll be giving a webinar titled “Optimizing I/O performance with ASE on Linux”. Being the Linux evangelist in our group, I get asked to make recommendations or suggestions on how to improve I/O performance on Linux, and if there are any “best practices” that I can share. What’s driving this question? Since the Linux kernel has dropped official support for raw partitions (major enterprise vendors are just back-porting it for compatibility reasons, but have said they plan to drop support for it in the future), customers are going to have to move to filesystem-based database devices at one point or another. With so much choice out there, which filesystem is best, and which one should you use?

I’ve been running benchmarks over the last few weeks, doing some more typical and real-world DBA operations on about 5 different filesystems, and have seen some interesting results — some of which I didn’t expect!! I’m going to start testing out some of the I/O schedulers as well, to see if those have any effect (positive or negative) on ASE performance too, because if you read the theory behind the schedulers, they are each tuned for different types of use.

The ultimate goal of this will be a whitepaper, but the webinar will definitely cover portions of the content that I will publish at a later time. If you would like to register for this webinar, you can go here and sign up.

Until next time,

-Chris

Recently I accompanied Sybase’s Bill Zhang on a tour around Belgium, Luxemburg and The Netherlands for a series of customer events.
Bill is the product manager for Replication Server and Mirror Activator, and as such, has his finger on the pulse of anything around those products.
Indeed, while listening to his presentations, I learned something new myself. It appeared that Replication Server 15.2 had quietly been released in February. (more…)

Let me take a minute of your day to introduce myself. I am Jeff Pryslak, a Senior Manager in the Evangelist Team at Sybase. My focus area has always been security, especially of information. This comes from my DOD background, where I worked on a number of applications leveraging PowerBuilder, Sybase ASE, Oracle, MS SQL Server and even Java, so my background within IT goes back over 15 years, and spans both development, production/operations.

The majority of my activity here will be about security and data architecture, so let me know if there is anything on your minds in that area and I will happy to cover it. Look for my next few posts on Row Level Access Control.

Hi, I’m Tom Traubitz, Director of Product Strategy for Sybase Enterprise Database product lines.   This means I mostly look after the future of Replication Server and Adaptiver Server Enterprise here at Sybase.  When I was first asked by the Sybase Blog team to write here, my first reaction was “Good God!  Who’d want to listen to what I have to say?”   Reassured that there might be use for my musings here, I will be writing about our product philosophy and future, hoping to shine a light in the dark corners of Sybase’s product plans and illuminate the business and product philosophy behind reasoning.

Some of you reading this have met me over the years in various public venus.   For those of you who don’t know, a brief introduciton is in order.   I’m a 17 year veteran of Sybase, Inc. joining Sybase back in 1992 as part of their Federal products group as a pre-sales consultant.    Since then, I’ve joined the Sybase corportate team managing ASE and have served in tern as ASE’s product marketing manager, director of product management, and now director of strategy.    My product philosophy is straightforward, serve our customers with high performing, highly reliable products and we will be 90% of the way to our goals as a product team.

I look forward to serving you through this product blog by taking you inside the Sybase product strategy process and hopefully explain some of Sybase philosophy that goes into our products.