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From: mats@enea.UUCP (Mats Josefsson)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Need info on SYBASE(R) RDBMS
Message-ID: <1977@enea.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 10:09:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: enea.1977
Posted: Tue Jun  9 10:09:34 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jun-87 04:00:43 EDT
Reply-To: mats@enea.se (Mats Josefsson)
Distribution: world
Organization: ENEA DATA Svenska AB, Sweden
Lines: 55
Keywords: SYBASE RDBMS

I have some questions for people who are using an RDBMS product
from Sybase Inc. (or anyone knowing the answers).

First, some background: I'm evaluating RDBMS products to be used
in a software development environment.  The system should aid in
development, production, support and maintenance of a large
real-time software system.  The database is to be used to keep
track of all parts of the system, dependencies between parts,
which parts has been delivered to whom etc.  It should also be
possible to see which delivered systems would be affected by a
software change and so on.  In addition to this we plan to 
support the administration of development and delivery projects
as well as the internal organization of the company (Who's assigned
to this project? Which projects are this guy assigned to?).

The system should be able to support around 100 simultaneous
users.  We haven't decided on the hardware yet, but it will 
probably be a supermini in the 10 Mips (or 780 equvivalents) range.
We estimate that the database will have about a hundred relations
with a total of a few million tuples.  The real-time system is about
5-10 GBytes of source and documentation. It's not necessary to keep
the source and doc's in the database though.

In the process of evaluating RDBMS systems I've come across the
products DataWorkbench/DataToolset* from Sybase Inc.  Since it is
a fairly new product and the company has no representatives 
outside the U.S.A., I wonder if anyone reading this newsgroup 
could help me with some questions.

1. Is it really as good as the "glossy brochures" say?  They claim
   for instance to go beyond Codd's 12 rules, supporting DBMS
   enforced integrity, backup and design changes on a "live" system,
   distributed data management etc.  These features would save a lot
   of application development/maintenance time.

2. I need some references to people using the system, preferably
   for an application like ours, but any experiences would do.

3. How is performance (as compared to Oracle, Ingres or others)?
   They claim up to 9 TP1 transactions/second on a Sun 3/160.  I
   don't know how this relates to the competition (Oracle, Ingres).

4. How good is the user interface and the application building
   tools.  They lack an ESQL interface, but claim that their 
   solution with a programming language interface is better.

* DataWorkbench and DataToolset are trademarks of Sybase Inc.

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Mats Josefsson, ENEA DATA, Sweden

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