SYBASE

Sybase

Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein founded Sybase , Inc . in 1984 . Their database product was based on UNIX , but quickly became usable on the nascent Windows operating system . For several years the company held a 2nd place in the database market , after Windows however , it rapidly lost ground in the 1990s and currently holds a small market share compared to other relational database management systems such as Oracle Informix and Microsoft SQL Server . However , Sybase 's earnings are strong and it is a solid player in the relational database market . See figure

1 for 2007 first-quarter results , showing a solid gain over 2006

Figure 1 : Comparison of Sybase first-quarter earnings over a period of four years (Source : Sybase , 2007 Sybase , 2005

Sybase 's stock market performance is also strong . Figure 2 demonstrates the 5-year performance of Sybase (SY ) in the market

Figure 2 . Generated automatically by EDGAROnline

Sybase 's main product is called Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise , or Sybase ASE , currently released at version 15 .0 .1 . Sybase ASE has an architecture of structured query language , or SQL , similar to Microsoft SQL Server

Sybase was founded in 1984 , the brainchild of Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein (Jones , 1997 . The relational database concept was still in its infancy Oracle , the first commercial relational database management system (RDBMS ) that supported SQL , had only begun shipping the year prior (Jones , 1997 . The original product ran on Unix using proprietary hardware , but it used raw disks and only a single CPU process - everything was processed within the single process , which greatly enhanced CPU performance and disk I /O (Jones , 1997 . Sybase was the first company to create a database that could be used on a PC or terminal across a network rather than on a mainframe it released its first LAN-based implementation in 1987 (Rigney , 1996 . However , the product did not implement SQL very well the founders of the company were proponents of an alternative query language called QUEL , which was more strongly designed into Sybase . The database was originally given to Microsoft for implementation in IBM 's OS /2 operating system , and then in Windows (Jones , 1997 . However , due to strained relations between the companies , Microsoft forked the code and produced its own relational database , called Microsoft SQL Server (Jones , 1997 . The two products are still very similar in architecture and share a SQL dialect called TransactSQL (Jones , 1997 . Sybase 's last decade of development has moved away from the single-format database architecture exemplified by Oracle and Informix products , preferring instead to customize its database architecture and design to specific market segments and uses (Rigney 1996 . Products such as Sybase iAnywhere , a database and business intelligence application suite designed for mobile computing platforms have kept Sybase on the forefront of customized database management solutions (Sybase , 2006

Sybase ASE architecture is less complicated than that of Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server . The ASE architecture uses two processes on the server side as well as a client process to manage connections . ASE uses one master...