To the best of my knowledge, Sybase's System 11 SQL-Server still
doesn't support a key feature named row-locking, which has been available from Informix and Oracle
for sometime. Page level locking as provided by Sybase, does compromise
on concurrency (many users accessing a database and its' tables at the
same time, without running into conflicts). The feature of System 11
that really caught my attention was the bit mapped indexing scheme,
which is claimed to be 20-100 times speedier than regular btree based
search mechanisms, when retrieving data, using columns that have
many duplicate values (low cardinality) (eg. gender). However, presently, sybase's bit
mapped indexing scheme works only on low cardinality columns, in contrast to,
Red Brick's bit mapped indexing strategy that can work on any column (field).
Sorry to be too technical in responding to your question. Powersoft (a subsidiary of Sybase),
is going to releasing Powerbuilder 5.0 by 1Q 1996, which seems to be very scalable, portable
(the same code will run on Windows, Mac, Unix, NT); programs will be compiled (using Watcom's
compiler technology) not interpreted, hence faster performance; dynamic application
partioning will also be supported. 1Q 1996, is going to be a very interesting one for SYBASE. |
