SQL Anywhere 10 on Deck

SQL Anywhere 10, whose Beta code eWEEK Labs looked at this past April, is now on my test bench in the form that buyers will see in September—and it shows the results of the three-year effort thats gone into updating iAnywhere Solutions flagship product.

My review of SQL Anywhere 10 will appear at about the same time that iAnywhere ships the bits. My findings should be of interest to enterprise architects and application developers who are looking for a portfolio of database technologies that combine ample capacity, intelligent performance optimization, granular security and ease of administration.

I asked iAnywhere team members if there were any database domains that they did not have in mind as targets. They acknowledged that their largest installations arent yet in the multiterabyte realm of the very largest database tasks.

Theyd like to dispel, though, any impression that SQL Anywhere is only an embeddable database for small-scale use within applications. (We learned during our tests that SQL Anywhere is the engine of the hosted service offering of CRM technology provider RightNow Technologies.)

Big-database features such as intraquery parallelism, an agent for Symantecs Veritas Cluster Server and “materialized views” for precomputing large-table-join results extend SQL Anywheres utility at the high end, while Symbian OS support and a broadened array of mobile-device synchronization options stretch the lower end as well.

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