Sybase Revs Up Real-time Database Software

Sybase on Monday took steps to deliver on its promise to deliver faster data results for enterprises needing rapid response time with a new software bundle that provides immediate insight into business changes.

Sybase Real Time Data Services allows heterogeneous databases to publish and subscribe information to or from messaging architectures to cut down on delays and systems performance degradation caused by batch or polling processes, said Haridar Nair, director of marketing, Sybase.

Nair provided a scenario of when RTDS would be particularly useful.

“When a bank closes a loan application, downstream applications need to know about that loan,” Nair told internetnews.com. “That is done using a batch process, meaning every half an hour an application looks at which loans have closed and send the info down to the downstream systems. Because the downstream systems are working on loans that have already been closed by the main application, this causes issues. This affects performance.”

Databases are wonderful at capturing data and keeping it within themselves, but a programmer has to write external polling programs to extract data. In other words, database software is not proactive; RTDS from Sybase aims to be proactive, Nair said, by extracting crucial data from disparate databases on the fly and without the need for custom applications.

Such solutions are becoming increasingly popular in the burgeoning market for real-time enterprise software as corporate data centers are looking for the biggest bang out of their buck without hiring additional IT administrators or making them tackle tasks that can be handled automatically by software.

“Databases could never connect to messaging infrastructure before, but now we have enabled these databases in a proactive manner to send events to those systems with RTDS,” Nair said.

Nair said RTDS is different from similar products from IBM, Oracle or Microsoft because while those companies might build a proprietary solution tailored for their own databases Sybase RTDS supports a variety of databases, providing flexibility customers with disparate systems need and want.

Those proprietary products also tend to be intrusive, Nair said, which affects database performance.

Packaged with the latest addition of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 12.5.2, RTDS doesn’t discriminate and supports IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle database software to provide flexibility at a time when multiple brands co-exist in one data center.

Sybase ASE, 12.5.2 includes smart SQL cache for better application performance; improved security through support for IPv6, Kerberos, Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) and Active Directory; enhanced Web Services and XML support; and support for database backup compression and password protected back-up.

Sybase RTDS is priced at $29,995 per CPU and Sybase ASE 12.5.2 starts at $1,495. Both will be available in May.