At the conference called by Emeryville, California-based Sybase Inc to announce the availability of seven components of the 11 System 10 database server family products (CI No 2,161), three companies were enlisted to back up Sybase’s pitch: Andersen Consulting, up and coming US client-server personnel and financial applications provider PeopleSoft Corp, Bachman Information Systems Inc and BP Exploration Ltd, the first representing value-added resellers or system integrators and the last end-users. All outlined how fab System 10 was, and how it would help them, with PeopleSoft rooting for database cursors and the new Open Client because it wants to offer customers better performance, distributed data management, system administration tools and very large database support, and Bachman promising to support System 10 – well, because it just liked Sybase so much. Its presentation was a sales pitch for the relatively beleagured ex-AD/Cycle company, and was the most content-free). Andersen’s Mark Miller described the Passenger Revenue Accounting System built by Andersen for North West Airlines between 1987 and 1990 and now being customised for Delta and three other US carriers – a huge mainframe and workstation system with the North West application handling around 90Gb of data (80% of which is host-based DB2, the rest Sybase). Miller described how the original system uses 1,000 mainframe Cobol programs and 75Gb of data on a DB2 disk data farm, with 400-plus Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc workstations running C application code and 15Gb of Sybase-held data. The new carriers are being offered a slimmed down, mainframe fat-free version: between 10 and 20 Sparcstation 10 Sybase database servers with up to 18Gb per server) replacing the mainframe, a set of batch servers with up to 4Gb of flat file space per server and range of on-line application server Sun workstations running Sybase Open Client. Delta will have about 180Gb of data, all in Sybase, for its implementation; the other three combined, again all Sybase, 320Gb. The North West application is said to handle 200,000 transactions a day – Delta wants 400,000. Phew. How can System 10 help? Miller picks out data back-up and integrity enhancements as areas where System 10 can make the system easier to manage. Two hours of every night can sometimes be spent backing up data: Miller demands System 10 improve this by an order of magnitude. And since every table in the application has triggers for primary and foreign keys and last update ID and data information, he thinks that 80% could go if the promised integrity enhancement features work. So with System 10 offering high performance transaction processing support, standards transparency and distributed large database application control, roll over Oracle Corp, hand in your keys Informix Software Inc, lights out Ingres Corp?

Figures are fabulous

Well…not quite. Though no-one can deny that Sybase’s recent figures are fabulous, Informix is doing well, too, and Oracle is still several times as large. For a reminder of some market realities, look at Sybase in the UK. In an eerie reversal of the situation in the North American market, Oracle’s next biggest competitor isn’t the plucky standards-hot Sybase but virtually a legacy operation, Ingres, currently owned by Ask Computer Systems Inc. Sybase has done very well in financial markets and companies in Wall Street and the City, mostly because for a long time it could offer facilities such as triggers and stored procedures that Oracle couldn’t. Outside of the Square Mile, it’s practically invisible in the UK relational database market, where Oracle runs unchecked, Ingres still does well on the back of its ICL Plc agreement into local and central government, and Informix, while selling like hot cakes, still mostly shifts its C-ISAM and Standard engines, not the high ticket OnLine. Changing that is partly the job of recently headhunted former Oracle staffer John Spiers, now marketing director for Northern Europe. He’s got a lot to do. System 10 may well help change that, but Sybase can’t p

lay the triggers now: everyone else, even Oracle in Oracle7, has caught up with such features now. Moving the game to a new playing field is a great idea, but you need not only another team to play against, but some spectators to pay at the gate. But at the moment, technologically, Sybase can do no wrong. Let’s hope for its sake that the customers really do want to build the huge and ambitious downsized applications for which System 10 has been designed. – Gary Flood