You could have been forgiven for thinking that not much had happened at Sybase in the last few years, as they’ve seen their market share dwindle and dwindle in the face of opposition from Microsoft (with it’s sister (of sorts) product to ASE), IBM and Oracle. The low single digits are about the best Sybase do these days, often prefaced with “Finance industry”.
Unfortunately for them (you’ll see why in a minute), they have actually been rather busy, having recently announced v15 of their flagship database product, and it’s probably the biggest overhaul of the product ever. Certainly since v11. For Sybase fans, there are some great features in this new release.
So why unfortunately? Well, the big release has been met with a big, resounding, awe-inspiring, silence by all of the computer press sites I make a point of reading these days, including the Register and news.com, which talks about the planned launch, but not much about it, or after it.
You’d almost think people don’t care these days… Or they’ve not actually done much in the way of moving the industry forward very much…. Or both.
I suspect it’s both. And I say that as somebody who is a Sybase DBA at the moment. There’s very little in either the Sybase product that can’t be done better in other products, more flexibly, more powerfully, and with less management. There’s certainly a lot of catching up going on in the product, witness the talk of a RAC like feature coming in the next release of v15 (I always worry when a vendor is selling you the next release of the product, rather than the product itself). That I can see, there’s really not much that’s being addressed that matters so much to enterprises out there at the moment, at least enterprises that care about minimising the amount of fiddling necessary to run a database platform.
So here’s the rub, to me at least. I think the DBA’s function as a guru of configuration options and optimiser tricks is not what’s needed by enterprises. Sure, they want people who understand the products, but they (should) want DBA’s further up the stack, working with developers to build better applications, solving business problems, and not fine-tuning obscure parts of their infrastructure at significant cost in both time and expense. Most of the problems can be fixed with good, proper, sensible data modelling techniques (the earlier the better), and using products that (as they rightly should) take care of the maintenance tasks (index rebuilds, statistics updates or de-fragmentation processes) automatically. You know, built-in. There are enough problems higher up, closer to the business to solve that most database platforms just aren’t approaching yet, and it’s here Sybase missed a march.
But I fear Sybase haven’t realised that, and for that reason I’m not sure we’re likely to see much of them in the computing press, at least until they get bought by somebody. But who’s likely to do that?
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