Hello, my name is Dave Neudoerffer, Vice President of engineering for Sybase iAnywhere. So you think you know what SQL Anywhere is…SQL Anywhere 11 just might change your mind. SQL Anywhere is actually a lot of different things. But first and foremost, it is a database management system for managing data outside the traditional data center. There are a lot of places of business where you need to manage data, but you don’t have administrators and IT staff to keep an enterprise type DBMS running. A common misconception here is that this is about managing and syncing data on a mobile device. Well, that's part of it, but a small part actually. We see serious data in retail stores, warehouses, small businesses, departments of large businesses, in manufacturing plants, and behind a lot of common software and systems such as accounting systems, point of sale, network management software, backup systems, phone systems, contact relationship management systems and inspection systems.
Selling the Future Promise (instead of Today’s Product)
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that customers and partners will often express a desire for something you don’t have. Many have laughed at the archetypical sales response of saying “yes, we can do that”. Engineering types will often take the exact opposite approach by promoting [...]
Today is Remembrance Day in Canada and the UK. Today is the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of every year, we Canadians remember the men and women who gave their lives in conflicts around the world for [...]
Data synchronization cannot simply be an add-on at the end of a development project. It must be designed in from the beginning. In many of my previous posts, I have promoted a process that we call Data Driven Mobile Application design. I firmly believe that organizations must think about all [...]
Our team has recently been in contact with a new customer using our new UltraLiteJ for Blackberry product. The customer provides mobile solutions for field service technicians. While I don’t usually post self congratulatory marketing type material here, I beg your indulgence this once. Here’s what they had to say [...]
Today is the last day of our quarter. For the last couple weeks, I have heard the question many times: “Is it done?”
The “IT” in this case is a new product option for UltraLite that will be useful in certain circumstances for some of our US Government accounts.
The answer to this [...]
In my previous posting, I discussed some of the issues and procedures that we go through within the SQL Anywhere team when considering the use of 3rd party components within SQL Anywhere.
After the bundling of a 3rd party component is approved, there are still two key considerations for our team.
Legal considerations
The ability [...]
– prior to integration of code
One of my tasks as Senior Director of Engineering is to keep a handle on all the 3rd party components we bundle or include in the SQL Anywhere product.
I am sure that our engineering team is not unique in the software industry in looking for ways to speed up development [...]
I would like to invite everyone to be involved in the beta testing of our
brand new graphical monitoring tool. The SQL Anywhere Monitor is a
browser-based administration tool that provides you with information about
the health and availability of SQL Anywhere databases and MobiLink servers.
The SQL Anywhere Monitor collects metrics and performance data from
databases and MobiLink servers [...]
Sybase Techwave is happening this week in Las Vegas. SQL Anywhere has made 3 major announcements:
Sybase iAnywhere Announces Availability of SQL Anywhere 11
Version 11 has lots of cool new features. Check out the Top 10 Cool New Features in SQL Anywhere 11
Next we have Sybase iAnywhere Targets Web Developer Community with New [...]
We recently published our new DocComment Xchangewebsite, built on SQL Anywhere.
DocCommentXchange is a community site for viewing and discussing SQL Anywhere documentation.
You can Use DocCommentXchange to:
View documentation
Check for clarifications users have made to sections of documentation.
Add your own comments and examples to clarify the documentation
Improve documentation for all users in future releases.
We [...]
I have not had a lot of time to post lately. Mostly due to
1) Getting everything done for the release of SQL Anywhere v 11.
2) My upcoming wedding at the end of August.
Regular posts should begin again soon…
SQL Anywhere ships a sample called instest (found in the Samples\SQLAnywhere\PerformanceInsert directory of your SQL Anywhere install) which allows you to experiment on insert performance for SQL Anywhere. However, it is important to think things through before picking requirements out of the air.
In speaking with potential customers, they often ask us whether we can [...]
I’ve been playing with SQL Anywhere’s support for web services. What is particularly cool is that you can call out to (or consume) a web service right from the database server using a stored procedure. Since I have been playing with blogs, and setting up rss, I wondered if I could consume RSS [...]
Well, I am in the middle of updating the blog to use the “Bad Behaviour” plugin to see if I can cut down on the amount of spam comments I am getting.
Fortunately the work I did to get the blog running on SQL Anywhere in a generic way allowed me to get this plugin up [...]
Capacity planning with SQL Anywhere: forthcoming webinar
A reminder that I’ll be presenting the last of the SQL Anywhere 11 webinar series, on Capacity Planning with SQL Anywhere, this coming Thursday 20 November 2008 at 11am EST. Here is a link to the Sybase registration page for the series; if at all possible please register beforehand.
In the talk, I’ll outline a methodology [...]
Soon after becoming a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, I teamed up with friend and fellow graduate student Darrell Raymond — now a Principal Consultant at The Gateway Group here in Waterloo — and started a weekly Friday afternoon seminar series for graduate students in the Data Structuring Group. The idea was to [...]
A reminder to all that I’ll be delivering a webinar on Full Text Search in SQL Anywhere 11 this Thursday, November 13 at 11:00am. Here is a link to the registration form for the webinar; if at all possible please sign up beforehand. In the talk, I’ll be outlining the support for full text search [...]
I’d like to remind everyone that tomorrow, November 11, is Remembrance Day in Canada, Britain, and other countries around the world. It is an opportunity to reflect on the horror of war and to remember the sacrifice made by so many Canadians in the wars and peacekeeping missions of this and the past century.
Remembrance Day [...]
Recently, Charles Levine of Microsoft posted a response on the SQL Server performance blog, entitled TPC-E: Raising the bar on OLTP Performance, to my article from 3 October entitled The State of TPC-E. In this post, I’d like to respond to some of the statements Mr. Levine made in his commentary, which are indented below:
TPC-C [...]
Computing Community Consortium offers Research Highlight of the Week
The Computing Research Association and the Computing Community Consortium are now offering a weekly highlight of, in their opinion, the most promising new result in Computer Science.
Their first offering is a summary of a new algorithm for network routing, or “what’s the best way to get to there from here”:
A new algorithm developed by [...]
This latest attempt at the holy grail of theoretical Computer Science, a proof that the complexity classes P and NP are equal (or not), caused a bit of a stir around the office this week. It’s not only that as Computer Scientists we are interested in the problem, but also because one of our former [...]
Hello, my name is Dave Neudoerffer, Vice President of engineering for Sybase iAnywhere. So you think you know what 
