I'd rather play golf

In February I introduced the Seven Deadly Sins of Database Application Performance. Our first deadly sin concerns physical database design, which includes schema design issues, table column order, indexing, and choice of database page size, to name but a few important factors, that can adversely impact performance. In this article, I want to explore a [...]

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Database design is all about creating abstract – or conceptual – models of the real world that can be manipulated to support the real, live enterprise. Most of the time we have an intuitive idea of what the business entities are that need to be represented in the model: customers could be modeled with a [...]

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SQL Anywhere has offered support for clustered indexes since the 8.0.2 release. There is no physical difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes in SQL Anywhere; any index can be marked as clustered, including those indexes implicitly created for the maintenance of referential integrity constraints. Moreover, one can apply or remove the “clustering” attribute of an [...]

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SQL Anywhere has offered support for clustered indexes since the 8.0.2 release. There is no physical difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes in SQL Anywhere; any index can be marked as clustered, including those indexes implicitly created for the maintenance of referential integrity constraints. Moreover, one can apply or remove the “clustering” attribute of an [...]

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SQL Anywhere has offered autonomic, self-managing statistics collection since 1992 [1]. In SQL Anywhere 12, we are going one step further with the introduction of a “statistics governor” that makes SQL Anywhere column histograms both self-monitoring and self-healing. Self-healing statistics management in SQL Anywhere 12 includes the: recording and categorization of selectivity estimation errors in [...]

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Based on feedback from authors, Shivnath Babu and I would like to announce that we are extending the paper submission deadline for the forthcoming DBTEST 2010 Workshop, which will be co-located with the 2010 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Indianapolis on Monday, June 7. You can find the call for papers here or on the DBTEST [...]

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In November 1995 we launched the first version of SQL Anywhere (version 5.0) that offered support for Transact-SQL, in addition to SQL Anywhere’s existing dialect, which we continue to call Watcom SQL. (By the way, SQL Anywhere 5.0 was my first SQL Anywhere release, as I had joined the firm just a month earlier). There [...]

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Tracking down table- or row-level contention amongst concurrent SQL Anywhere connections can be difficult to debug. In this tutorial, I’ll illustrate how one can use Application Profiling in Sybase Central to capture blocking events, which can help pinpoint where the contention is occurring and why. As my example, I’ll utilize two DBISQL connections connected to [...]

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In SQL Anywhere Version 10 we introduced Application Profiling, a set of graphical tools that could not only assist DBAs to diagnose performance problems but could also recommend solutions to common performance problems discovered during the analysis. Included in Application Profiling is a (cheap) mechanism to capture queries (and their access plans) that consume a [...]

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In recent weeks we have been working with a few customers who are migrating from older SQL Anywhere releases to SQL Anywhere 11. Moving from older releases (9 and below) to Version 11 requires a complete rebuild of the database file. This is because in SQL Anywhere Version 10 we changed the the storage layout [...]

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