If you haven’t noticed that Sybase released a new version of ASE recently, don’t blame yourself. ASE 15.5 became available around mid-December 2009, but so far, there has been no publicity about it. That will change soon, though. To pre-empt any conspiracy theories, the only reason for keeping quiet is the -pretty reasonable- assumption that most folks might have preferred to spend the Christmas period with their families rather than tuning in to a webcast about ASE 15.5. So with the holiday season now well behind us, expect to see PR activity around ASE 15.5 soon.
The agenda currently contains the following events: (more…)

I have been working on an Encrypted Columns demo over the past few weeks that leverages the default value setting in Sybase ASE 15 for default values. The parameter on the create table statement from the online docs:
create table emp (name char(50), ssn (char(11) encrypt derypt_default '000-00-000', ...)
In the PowerBuilder application that we have been using to show the data, this default value is allowing us to create the encrypted data without modifying the base app. This does not mean the app will never need to be modified, since the password for the role is not included for future decryption… but this is step one in our compliance effort for protecting information. Our next step is to look at the current app and see how we can add a stored procedure call or embedded password managment to protect the role password from being hard coded.

will look at password management with encrypted columns next.
until then….