Sybase Inc believes that the combination of its forthcoming Intelligent Query Accelerator and System 11 relational database management system will prove a more elegant and cost-effective way of boosting the performance of database implementations than by brute force (and expensive main memory) proposed by the recent Digital Equipment Corp-Oracle Corp coupling (CI No 2,649). The company claims to have some internal applications running at up to 4,000 time faster using Intelligent Query Accelerator. The accelerator indexes every query against data represented as bits in a bit-map, eliminating table scans – and therefore up to 90% of input-output transactions, the company says. Intelligent Query, claimed to work with any supported SQL tool and across a variety of databases, goes into beta test at the end of the quarter and will ship sometime in the third. At Sybase, it has been integrated with System 10 and will go forward into System 11, then back down to previous implementations of the database. Sybase expects other database vendors to follow suit with optimised indexing technologies. Although not developing strictly hand-in-hand with Intelligent Query Accelerator, System 11 will include other performance-enhancing techniques, such as support for multiple named caches that can address more than 2Gb memory where it is available, such as on the DEC Turbo Lasers, which accommodate up to 12Gb RAM. Although it says it has got 64-bit projects under way with DEC engineers, and may be investigating technologies that can wring performance gains out 64-bit systems as Oracle Very Large Memory does, Sybase is not about to run off and re-write its kernel in 64 bits, even though the major system vendors are all likely to be touting their 64-bit wares by this time next year. However it is not sure exactly who, or what, would benefit from such a move since the majority of the data accessed by applications is typically stored in packets that are less than 64 bits in size.
