Sybase Inc finally unveiled its object strategy, a sizeable way behind rivals Oracle Corp and Informix Inc, to a largely lukewarm reception at its International User Group’s 1996 North American Conference held in San Diego last week. Although making it clear that for now the company is only talking up its object vision and product road map, not actual product releases, Dennis McEvoy, president of Sybase’s Enterprise Business group, stressed the end-to-end nature of the vendor’s approach to the object technology conundrum. This embraces not only a new object-relational database, a variant of SQL server 11, known as Adaptive Server, but also draws heavily on the company’s existing Object Connect middleware and its Powersoft family of tools (Powerbuilder 5.O, Optima++ and Watcom ++). We’ve done a pretty good job in the industry of providing objects for clients with VBXs and OCXs, says McEvoy. But we have neglected the application layer and the database. Sybase, you may remember, spent several years investigating whether to build its own pure object-oriented database code-named Brahms, but abandoned that attempt late last year. Its other object-oriented project, known as Lego, will become a product as Object Connect for Object Linking & Embedding. The C++ release of the object middleware already in the market is derived from Persistence Software Inc’s object-to- relational mapping and code generation software.

Copycat comparisons

As for Adaptive Server, it apparently represents the object- relational evolution of SQL Server 11 and will incorporate complex structured data types, such as text search, time series, geo-spatial and HyperText Mark-up Language, either within the body of the database or as specialty snap-ins. Sound familiar? Well, Sybase had to fight off copycat comparisons with what Informix is attempting to do with Illustra Corp and its DataBlades. It differentiates itself by the aforementioned spread of focus, that is, not database-myopic, and the fact that its partners who will supply some of the specialty snap-ins will not be contracted a la Illustra, but will be real long term partners. David Hsieh, the newly-hired vice-president enterprise marketing contrasted the Illustra DataBlade for geo-spatial data with what Sybase plans as a spatial snap-in with its partner Vision International, a division of Autometric Inc of Alexandria, Virginia. He claims Illustra’s offering does not conform to any of the 20 different geo-spatial standards out there, taking its measurements from the Equator, so accuracy can be off by as much as 46%, while Vision’s special query server asserts accuracy to the nearest foot. McEvoy was even more forthright, dubbing Informix’s idea of taking body parts from scalable and non-extensible Informix and extensible and non- scalable Illustra and trying to stitch them together a Frankenstein approach. He claims that both Informix and Oracle with its Oracle 8 database will be forced to re-write all levels of their databases at once in order to obtain their Nirvana of a Universal Server. Incremental extensibility is the right approach, he says in justification. Our component- based approach to the problem is consistent with the way that object technology is supposed to work. Sybase claims that it does not believe in dumping every kind of data type into Adaptive Server, which can compromise performance, explaining that while the object-relational database will support video and audio clips, it will not handle unstructured data such as video and audio streams, which will continue to be dealt with by Sybase’s Intermedia server. The vendor says it wants to ensure relational quality performance in objects and that users will be able to join specialist and relational data in the same query. Sybase plans to incorporate the SQL 3 standard into Adaptive Server over time, but does not expect it to play a large role in defining re-usable business objects, which it says will better be developed in existing programming languages such as PowerBuilder, C++ and Java. It expects t

o release the first group of its snap-in products this summer.