Database-maker Sybase reaches terabyte league

Version 15 will be able to support databases with up to 32 terabytes of data, the company's director of worldwide evangelism, systems engineering Irfan Khan told a small group of high-profile customers like Citigroup and Colonial First State at a Sydney seminar this morning.

Other additions included support for on-disk encryption and better integration with decision support applications.

Khan also outlined other improvements in the software, including better support for XML-formatted data, and the ability to access unstructured data -- a feature which had previously been sold separately to the main AES product.

The executive said performance had also improved. "Early beta tests show Linux transaction performance improving by almost 10 percent over ASE 12.5.2," he said.

He claimed a new feature dubbed 'Smart Partitions' worked with optimisation techniques to "eliminate bottlenecks" in databases. The company has previously said its query engine was rewritten for the upgrade.

A host of minor upgrades included wizards to aid novice administrators and better information about the software's inner workings.

Local Sybase managing director Rob Zalums told the audience the upgrade was the most exciting in his company's history.

He said Sybase has sold ASE to 700 new customers in the last year, although its specialised IQ relational database, which is optimised for business intelligence and reporting, was showing the strongest growth (at 50 percent) of the company's product line.

ASE is available locally in several different versions, including a free 'Express Edition' for the Linux platform that is limited to supporting 5Gb of data on a server with 2GB of memory and a single processor.

A version targeted at small businesses starts at AU$1,495. The full version runs on all popular server operating systems.