Emeryville, California based Sybase Inc has continued its roll-out of its System 10 next generation of relational database management system engines and tools (CI No 2,161) with the announcement of the Replication Server. Replication Server is claimed to be a form of software fault-tolerance for high-performance and reliable distributed applications. This is a key component of Sybase’s competitive positioning against relational database behemoth Oracle; after Oracle’s technological catch-up with version 7, which finally brought Sybase features like triggers and referential integrity to Oracle, the latter is seeking to re-set the agenda with a new concept in distributed data for the SQL world. This market, we are told, has suffered a confidence lag from large corporates that would rather trust their secure, core systems and high-volume transaction processing applications to proprietary but proven host technology than relational databases and Unix servers. Vendors like Sybase and the vowel companies (ASK/Ingres, Informix and Oracle) have been dumping functionality into products such as the two-phase commit approach to data security over the last five years. But beyond two phase commit and distributed databases (Sybase’s dismissal of Oracle7) lie distributed systems. At each node in a distributed network will be a copy of Replication Server which forwards changes in data from a primary to secondary sites through a Log Transfer Manager. An example is a company with London, Tokyo and New York offices. Data needs to be transferred between all three. What if one site’s machine fails? Sybase sees a copy of Replication Server at one of the other sites holding all the data that has changed – not tables or databases, but data items. When the damaged site comes on line, the changed data is fed down the wire and like magic all three operations are in sync. This being computers and not fairytale land, this doesn’t come easy or that cheap. Controlling the underlying complexity (for example configuration management and component status) is Tivoli Systems Inc’ DME Framework Toolkit, and a set of graphical user interface tools. The base cost for the primary copy is $30,000 and $15,000 per secondary, available in production fourth quarter for Unixes beginning with the IBM Corp RS/6000 and Solaris. The thing is the result of three years’ work in collaboration with eight customers in areas like defence, telecommunications and finance, and Sybase expects it to be accompanied by consultancy.
