Lost In The Shuffle, A New Database Sighting
Sybase may be the perennial forth largest supplier of enterprise database servers in a three database race. But its databases still have clout in a number of key industry segments, including telecommunications and financial services.
Yet last week, all of the attention on Sybase went to its new iPhone support and the fact that it seems to have gotten a respite from Sandell Asset Management Corp., which holds 6 percent of Sybase's shares and has been in conflict with management over ways to improve shareholder value. Without getting into the gory details, Sybase has agreed to purchase $300 million of its own common stock
Lost in all that, Sybase last week upgraded its embedded database offering. Sybase's new Advantage Database Server 9.0 boasts a major boost in performance for large transactions and is designed to support both ISAM table-based and SQL-based data access, making it a viable option for organizations with legacy applications looking to meld their systems with more current technologies.
Advantage is often used by commercial and corporate developers, Sybase said. Among other things, the new release adds Visual FoxPro 9 file format support, the ability to run as a native 64-bit app on Windows and Linux for better memory utilization, and a new visual SQL debugger. According to Sybase, the new debugger lets developers debug SQL scripts, stored procedures, triggers and user-defined functions. The price ranges from $645 for five-users to $7,870 for an unlimited license.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/26/2008