VARs Laud New SQL Anywhere 10 Beta As Good For Big-Time Database Jobs

Sybase's iAnywhere subsidiary is making the beta of SQL Anywhere 10 available Monday. Chief among new features is hot failover for high availability, support for Microsoft's .Net 2.0 tools and frameworks, and tight integration with Visual Studio 2005, according to the Waterloo, Ontario-based company.

"They need to get away from the idea that this is a cute little database. This release has hot failover, redundant mirroring, so if one fails, no data is lost and there is minimal downtime," said Paul Horan, senior consultant with Cynergy Systems, a Washington-based solution provider.

SQL Anywhere leads the league when it comes to a small database that can be embedded in devices and other applications, observers said. Intuit's QuickBooks 2006 was built on this database after a long evaluation, said Tim Child, director of platform engineering at Intuit, Mountain View, Calif.

"We chose it because of portability and reliability.

I think it's the best platform for embedding in applications," he said.

Solution providers were also quick to point out that there is a server-side component in Adaptive Server Anywhere that also is compactrequiring as little as 8 Mbytes of memory and 10 Mbytes of disk space.

C.C. Wilson, president of Digital Inspections, a Corvallis, Ore.-based solution provider specializing in work with electric utilities, said the .Net 2.0 support is important since his company is moving all its development work to Visual Studio.

But he also lauded SQL Anywhere's "big iron" capabilities. "These things literally run. You don't have to buy a dedicated quad-processor machine to run this," Wilson said.

The difference between this and rival offerings from Microsoft, IBM and others is that "they all started out as big databases and tried to shrink down. iAnywhere came out of Watcom SQL in the early '90s, starting life as a small footprint database and growing up," he noted.

The success of iAnywhere has not been lost on rivals. Microsoft two weeks ago launched a renewed effort on client-side mobile databases, announcing a future offering called SQL Everywhere.

Windows and Linux versions are due in the third quarter, with Macintosh and Unix versions to follow in the fourth quarter.