With the 16.0 version of the Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), SAP is offering customers features to enable extreme transaction processing. SAP is also releasing Replication Server, 15.7 SP200 which includes synchronous replication for high availability and disaster recovery for SAP Business Suite on SAP ASE.
“Transaction processing just continues to explode and go to extreme speed and scale,” said Dan Lahl, VP, Database & Technology Marketing, SAP, in a recent interview. “If you look at Wall Street, back in 2006 they [companies] were doing about 53,000 transactions per second going through the New York Stock Exchange and now they are doing about 500,000 per second - that is a 10x increase in the last 7 years. If you look at Telco, the forecast calls for 30 billion connected end points by 2020. Amazon had 36.8 million items ordered on Cyber Monday last year; and Alibaba, the Chinese company that is in competition with Amazon, did about five times that with the New Year’s Celebration that just passed.”
It has been 9 years since Sybase (acquired by SAP in 2010) announced ASE 15 (in August 2005). With the new release, said Lahl, whether for on-premise environments or cloud environments, ASE is providing “the right system of record that is going to be able to handle the new world of transaction processing.”
Focus on scale, speed, security and simplicity
This pressure on systems is causing an extreme data and transaction challenge that requires companies to have a rock solid system of record that can not only process millions of transactions, but also support rapid growth in transactions and user levels, be 100% secure, and also be cost effective to run from a hardware standpoint and from a database administration standpoint, said Lahl. “We have been talking for a long time about how data is exploding, but we are really seeing that in the area of transactions. It is not just big data for analytics; it is big data for transactions now.”
According to SAP, the latest version ASE 16.0 enables customers to economically process extremely large numbers of transaction on ever growing volumens of data with one integrated transactional database system. SAP ASE 16.0 also integrates broadly with other SAP products such as SAP Business Suite and SAP HANA, further enhancing performance, manageability and interoperability in SAP focused installations.
ASE 16 scalability
Supporting scalability on the cloud and on premise, ASE 16 provides features including lock management enhancements, metatadata and latch enhancements, relaxed query limites, partition level locking, and ASE to HANA data access. These features result in linear scale up on large SMP systems, a higher degree of concurrency, the ability to execute more queries faster while using fewer resources, and access to more data concurrently from multiple sources.
ASE 16 speed
To support the higher speed necessary for extreme transcation processing, ASE 16 provides dynamic thread assignment, index compression, and query processor enhancements. The result is faster query times, and better use of I/O operations and storage resources. In addition, reduced cache misses acceleate response times as well as optimized query exectuive for improved query speed.
ASE 16 security
Ensuring high levels of data security and applicaiton availability, ASE 16 features full database encryption, full text auditing, and residual data removal. And, as part of the latest ASE release, SAP Replication Server now offers synchronous replication to ensure zero data loss for mission-critical SAP Business Suite applications. This offers customers the security for high availability and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, SAP Replication server supports real-time, transactional data replication from SAP Business Suite and non-SAP custom applications running on Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle, SAP ASE, and SAP HANA. Also, customers will benefit from an integrated approach to deliver real-time data consistently to SAP Data Services, enabling them to drive business analytics and make critical decisions on the fly.
ASE 16 simplicity
And, to simplifiy datase operations and improve DBA productivity, SAP Control Cneter provides a compression advisor, support for incremental backup andsupport for up to 250 servers, as well as
Customer Proof Point with ASE 16
SAP has been working with the China Academy of Railway Sciences on an upgrade from ASE 15.7 to ASE 16, the company is now able to achive near linear scalability from 24 corese up to 64 cores, said Lahl. “They are now actually able to do greater than 80,000 transactions per second as they scale their application so they can get their 9 million a day.”
New Benchmark for ASE 16
SAP has also just published results for Sybase 16 on the SAP SD Benchmark, which is the classic sales and distribution benchmark that SAP publishes for the Business Suite application. At 25,451 SD users, said Lahl, “We just took the record for Intel-based four-processor systems.”
In addition, the next ASE release, which goes into beta in Q4 of 2014, and will be delivered as GA in Q1 of 2015 - will build on the extreme transaction focus with more of the in-memory capabilities gained from experience with HANA, as well as multi-version concurrency control, compiled queries, and tiering with the different data levels from memory to SSD to disk. “We are meeting the new world of what is happening in transaction processing,” said Lahl.