Sybase Inc. is preparing its flagship Adaptive Server Enterprise database to help customers meet security and privacy demands and deal with data volume growth, database threading and unstructured data management.
The Dublin, Calif., company next week will unveil ASE 15, which features smart partitions, on-disk encryption, XML and clustering capabilities, and bolstered operation management features, said Raj Nathan, senior vice president of Sybases Information Technology Solutions Group.
ASE 15 editions, which range from the free Express Edition to the Enterprise family of products, are all currently available. ASE 15 runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.
ASE 15 features new query processing technology that drastically increases performance thresholds and reduces hardware resource consumption, said Nathan. The processing engine uses smart partitions to pinpoint only the information required.
Monitoring about 190 million occurrences and 140 million expenditures a year involving media advertising for more than 2.2 million brands, Ira Klein, vice president of production systems for TNS Media Intelligence, of West Chester, Pa., said the accuracy and performance of databases are critical for his organization.
“As we add more and more data into the database, and we provide more media [data sources], and we expand our coverage, which actually adds to the [information] volume, our customers expect that the response times to reports theyre asking for are unchanged, so performance is absolutely critical,” said Klein. “We cant compete if we cant generate reports in a timely manner, meaning having the data available and reliable is extremely important to us.”
A business unit of Taylor Nelson Sofres plc., TNS Media Intelligence is running four production servers featuring the ASE database, which maintains more than a total of 1TB of data. Klein is evaluating ASE 15 and said the new version should help cut down on re-engineering and operations burdens.
ASE 15 tackles unstructured and semistructured data management with new XML capabilities, as well as simplified XML document generation and schema validation features. The database offers extended services for directly accessing unstructured data within operating system files that are now bundled—as opposed to sold separately—with the base server.
Other new features within ASE include VLSS (very large storage system), for managing large data sets; auto-update statistics, for lightening the administration load; computed columns, for simplified application design; and scrollable cursors, which allow developers to build applications that deal with large result sets.
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