I'd rather play golf

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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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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Despite our efforts at making relational database systems such as SQL Anywhere self-managing, self-tuning, and self-healing, there remains the need to be able to diagnose and repair performance problems. In part, this requirement is due to the overall complexity of the optimization task. Query optimization is – still – an NP-hard problem and the input [...]

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At June’s 2009 ACM SIGMOD Conference, Surajit Chaudhuri of Microsoft Research presented a thought-provoking paper [1] entitled “Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract?”. Here is the abstract: Query Optimization is expected to produce good execution plans for complex queries while taking relatively small optimization time. Moreover, it is expected to pick the execution plans [...]

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SQL Anywhere version 11.0.0 introduced support for search conditions that include regular expression searching. There are two variants of regular expression search predicates that one can use, each with their own semantics: SIMILAR TO and REGEXP. SIMILAR TO The SIMILAR TO predicate is part of the 2008 ANSI/ISO SQL standard. However, the draft of the [...]

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ACM SIGMOD 2009 is being held in Providence, Rhode Island from June 29 through July 2. The conference program is online and this year’s sessions look particularly interesting. Alas I will not, unfortunately, be able to attend. However, Anil Goel and Ani Nica of my staff will be at SIGMOD. In particular, Ani will be [...]

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Yesterday the workshop’s PC co-chair, Carsten Binnig, posted the forthcoming DBTEST 2009 workshop program. This second DBTEST workshop is co-located with the 2009 ACM SIGMOD Conference, which will be held in Providence, Rhode Island later this month. Registration for both the workshop and the complete conference is now open. The workshop comprises talks of the [...]

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Object-relational mapping toolkits such as Hibernate/NHibernate, LINQ, and others permit one to develop object-oriented database applications in the paradigm offered by the object-oriented language (Java, C#, C++) and workaround the issues of the impedance mismatch between the application’s abstractions and the persistent relational store. My colleague Jason Hinsperger has written previously regarding the additional complexity [...]

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Every so often we encounter a situation where a prospective customer asks whether or not SQL Anywhere offers support for materialized views – or, more commonly, supports “materialized views” by another name. Below is a list of synonyms for materialized views across different commercial RDBMS products: DBMS Terminology When How Who MS SQL Server Indexed [...]

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OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) functions were first published as an addendum to the ISO SQL:1999 standard, and since have been completely incorporated into both the SQL:2003 and the recently-published SQL:2008 ISO SQL Standards. SQL Anywhere has included OLAP functionality since the 9.0.1 release (February 2004), which comprises grammar and query processing support for: GROUP BY [...]

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