At least for the year 2001, mark June as the month for databases.
Sybase yesterday announced Version 12.5 of its flagship Adaptive
Server Enterprise (ASE) database, and last week Red Hat said it
would introduce an open-source database onto the market.
Sliding in during the last week of the month, the two companies are
the latest in a flurry of June database releases.
Three of the top five database vendors, as ranked by analyst group
Dataquest, have issued new releases this month. The exceptions are
Informix, which was recently purchased by IBM, and Microsoft, which
demonstrated its forthcoming version of SQL Server, code-named
Yukon, at the TechEd developers conference in Atlanta.
Earlier in the month, IBM and Oracle each brought to market new
iterations of their databases.
In ASE 12.5, Sybase is keeping with the common themes of dynamic
performance, enhanced data management, and security that its main
competitors touted with their recent releases.
With ASE 12.5, database administrators can alter performance
mechanisms - such as load and resource allocation - without
rebooting the database. Sybase also enhanced the product's
clustering capabilities by enabling two-node clusters in which both
systems work simultaneously and either machine can pick up when the
other fails.
Sybase also extended the data management functionality of ASE so
that XML documents can be stored, indexed, and queried from the
database.
The company also furthered its security with row-level access rules
and encryption of communication between clients and servers.
"We're a little different from our competitors in that we don't
view databases as one size fits all," said Tom Traubitz, Sybase's
senior marketing manager for ASE.
Instead, Sybase offers separate databases for mobile, transaction
processing, and data warehousing. ASE is the transaction processing
database.
Although Sybase, like Oracle, has been "reinventing" itself into an
e-commerce platform provider, Dataquest's recent numbers showed it
defended its market share, judging on revenue from new licences for
2000. The previous year, Dataquest listed at 3.3%; this year it
weighed in at 3.2%. Sybase also surpassed Informix, which last year
had 5% of the market and this year dropped to 3%.
Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft's rankings are 33.8%, 30.1%, and 14.9%,
respectively. All three, in fact, gained one or two percentage
points over the past year.
With its database, Red Hat joins the open-source troops Great
Bridge, NuSphere, and Abriasoft.