Stable Supported ASE

There were recent announcements from Sybase (www.sybase.com) you may have gotten in your inboxes about EOL software. Most of us DBA's really just focus on ASE, IQ or Repserver. That's pretty much what myself and colleagues of mine did in the past weeks, but it brought some things to light about truly stable versions and EBF's . Here's my take on this by version and OS (note: if you are using a Sybase database on Windows, you have bigger problems, and you should know it)

1) If you MUST stay on ASE 12.x.x, then the only stable version you can use on Solaris RISC (or x86) is 12.5.4 - latest ESD or EBF, this version is 64 Bit only, phasing out 12.5.2 or 3 versions that were 32 Bit mainly - these "back-fills" are mainly mandated by vendor apps who are slow to certify on platforms. I strongly suggest pushing for this if you have to stay on 12. I have years of stable experience on this version on SPARC, using 32 engines and over and 64 GB or cache and over. It's hard to beat on reliability. (side note: EMC raw devices done right)

2) If you can go ASE 15.x.x, stick with 15.0.2 EBF 15966 ESD#6 on Solaris RISC or x86. This has been a stable product for my environment since 2008, even in production. Same goes for IQ  - stick with 15.0.2. 12.7 is bug mess. The only gotcha you may run into is cache tuning, especially with proc cache - don't be stingy,  allocate large block I/O cache for DB's you know will utilize it and tune proc cache respectively. With speed (engines and big cache) comes opportunity, so don't be stingy with open object and index tuning either. I have several systems with zero downtime using this method.

3) If you are on Linux, and I hope you are using a real RH Server 5, Centos or Debian implementations, then go the max with 15, there's really no other way. be sure to be patched to the gills.

Contact: daquijne@josephdaqui.com (copyright 2010)