Sybase is looking to bolster both performance and productivity for users with the release of the latest version of Advantage Database Server.
Version 9.0 of the product, announced March 17, is one of two embedded database offerings from Sybase. It includes a number of enhancements aimed squarely at application developers. For starters, the company has built in what officials say is a more efficient way to optimize multi-segmented filters by evaluating the most restricted segment first.
“When the evaluation of the more restrictive segments results in only a few rows passing the filter, the server will short-circuit the index scan of the less restrictive segments, [to avoid] the cost of scanning many index pages,” said Chuck Vertrees, product manager for Advantage Database Server at Sybase iAnywhere. “This optimization is most useful when the filter is applied to a very large table [more than 1 million] and when one or more conditions are significantly more restrictive than the others.”
Since Advantage Optimized Filters are used extensively by the SOL engine, this optimization will improve performance for certain SOL statements, he said.
In addition, the product has been ported to run as a native 64-bit application on the x64 versions of Windows and Linux to increase memory-usage capabilities, officials said. The company has also added, among other things, a visual SQL debugger as well as an event notification capability, new default user groups and dynamic server configuration in the name of productivity.
Beyond the performance and productivity enhancements, the company has included support for Visual FoxPro 9 in the product to open a new community of developers and market for Sybase, company officials said. According to Vertrees, the Indexed Sequential Access Method capabilities of ADS are uniquely suited to the needs of the VFP community.
“Previous to ADS 9.0 these FoxPro users have not been able to use the level of database functionality provided by ADS while retaining their ISAM methods, file types and data table types,” he said.