The Invisible Database

As we start into 2011, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. As the year starts, I offer a few observations about the year that was, and the year that is to be, for the SQL Anywhere development team here in Waterloo, Ontario.

2010

Our team celebrated an important release in 2010, with the launch of SQL Anywhere version 12. As we closed out 2010, the team was hard at work on the first maintenance release, version 12.0.1, which is currently planned for release later in Q1, 2011.

August of 2010 saw the Sybase acquisition by SAP. Many bits and bytes have been spent on this topic in numerous other places on the web, so I won’t attempt to analyze anything about it here. I will say, that to this point, the acquisition by SAP hasn’t affected us here in Waterloo at all.

I was fortunate to travel to Europe in September to meet with several customers, as well as present SQL Anywhere at a seminar in London. After spending 2 weeks in Europe, I traveled to California the next week to attend Cisco’s annual Supplier Appreciation Event, where we were thrilled to win the Cisco Software Excellence award.

In the fall of 2010, our team was saddened as we said goodbye to a long time friend and colleague, Geno Coschi who fought a brave battle with cancer. Geno was one of the first employees at WATCOM, over 28 years ago, and I had the honor to work closely with Geno for many years, as a fellow Senior Director of Engineering.

2011

We start out the year hard at work with our final bits of development and QA for the SQL Anywhere 12.0.1 release. Additionally our team is excited to be working on a number of exciting new initiatives. I believe that we have some really interesting things for both mobile application developers as well as software ISVs that I will be talking about in more detail as we move through the year, so stay tuned!