The Invisible Database

Over the years, the SQL Anywhere focused NNTP newsgroups have been among the most used of all Sybase newsgroups. To date, there have been over 60,000 posts to these newsgroups. A very active user community has built up around our newsgroups to help answer questions for users and developers, aided and assisted by active Team Sybase customers and Sybase employees. I have often searched the newsgroups for answers to technical questions myself. Without hesitation, I direct any sales prospects to visit the newsgroups for the good, the bad, and the ugly about SQL Anywhere. I am not afraid of the truth, even when it hurts, because overall, I think SQL Anywhere is a great product, and our community of users is the best.

Just over a year ago, one of our long time SQL Anywhere focused “Team Sybase” members, Breck Carter decided to try a new approach and created a web forum using the StackExchange platform. Breck called the new venture “SQLA“. Without much advertising outside of his own blog, the SQLA web forum grew. It attracted many of the same newsgroup community members, as well as newer customers who find a web based approach much easier to use than the old NNTP approach. Sybase welcomed the creation of this site, and we were happy that it was community driven.

We would have been happy to allow SQLA to continue to grow on its own using the StackExchange platform, however in April of last year, that all changed. The StackExchange folks decided to completely change their approach, and prepared to pull the plug on the SQLA community, to “make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.” We don’t agree.

Seeing that a web forum was proving very popular, we decided that we couldn’t let SQLA simply die. As a result, the SQL Anywhere team undertook a project to create a web forum based on the SQLA idea, yet sponsored by Sybase in a way that removes the requirement for StackExchange.

Today, we are very pleased to announce that the new SQL Anywhere Forum Q&A site is live and in beta test at http://sqlanywhere-forum.sybase.com/. All the questions from the existing SQLA site have been loaded into the new site. Existing users of SQLA are able to claim their userid on the new system, and retain their accumulated “reputation” points. If you are a current user of SQLA, please see details here.

Check out the new site, and provide any feedback you may have right in the site itself. In my next post, I will describe how we created the new SQL Anywhere Forum, and how it works.