Enterprise Database, Data Management and Business Continuity

What follows is a partial and unedited list of sessions selected for this track at TechWave. We are working diligently to finish developing conference content, edit the material and bring the session search application online. In the meantime please feel free to make use of this material. The full schedule should be available soon. Note that this material is subject to change without notice.

Adaptive Server Enterprise - Futures and Directions
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Learn about new innovations being worked on by R&D
- Learn about key capabilities and enhancements on ASE roadmap for the next 24 months
- Express larger, more strategic business and technical needs to ASE product management
Curious to know what new innovations ASE R&D will bring to you in near future? Come and learn about new capabilities being introduced in ASE. We will share highlights around key product directions and release roadmaps for ASE for the next 24 months. You will also get a chance to express your larger, more strategic business and technical needs directly to Sybase team responsbile for ASE.

Advanced Techniques for Controlling User Access to Data
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, Consultant, IS/IT Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Introduction to the RLAC Structure
- Syntax Review and Practical Example
- The Magical Where Clause, The Results applied RLAC
Historically, DBA, s have employed several effective techniques to ensure only authorized users see the data they are entitled to see. For years, the combination of logins, permissions, and views were all that were needed. Over the years as systems have become larger and more complex, business and regulatory policies are leading developers and DBA, s to use more advanced techniques for controlling user access to data. This session will review "Row Level Access Control" (RLAC) techniques and provide details their functional capabilities as well as how developers and DBA, s can use these techniques to ensure their (and their customers) data is kept private. We will conclude with a real-life use case showing how a customer limited data retrieval on credit cards in order to be compliant with Visa's CISP policy.

Application Tracing: Identifying the performance bottleneck in ASE 15.0.2
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Understand how to use application tracing feature
- Understand how to identify problematic queries using the application tracing feature
- Understand how this feature can be used to archive SQL plan and other useful information
Identifying problematic query in a prepackaged application is a difficult task. With ASE 15.0.2 users can now trace an application execution and capture SQL and other useful information for each of the queries executed and pin-point the problematic query which is the cause for poor performance. This feature can also be used to capture SQL and other useful information when a specific user or application logs into the server. With this feature one can archive SQL and associated metrics for future references.

Application Partitioning Patterns to Scale-out Enterprise Database Systems
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Application Architecture for Horizontal Scalability of Applications on ASE Cluster Edition
Today, CIO's are enamored with the prospect of replacing expensive SMP servers with commodity hardware. Complicating matters, overly aggressive vendors who "sell high" in an organization often trivialize the real challenges architects must confront to move enterprise database applications from the vertically-scalable combination of hardware and software used today to the horizontally- scalable hardware and software of tomorrow. Key to achieving scalability in distributed systems is the concept of partitioning. Early systems providing "infinite" scalability were based on shared- nothing concepts where data and processing were partitioned onto independent systems. Unfortunately, these techniques were not simple to implement and ultimately manage in production. With the maturity of SAN and clustering technologies, more and more applications are candidates for scale-out using application partitioning techniques. This presentation will provide you with insight into standard design patterns for building and managing highly scalable applications on clusters of commodity hardware that have been proven over the last 15 years in financial services and telecommunications applications.

ASE Backup Server - Internals and Troubleshooting Tips
Audience Job Function: DBA
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Understand the ASE backup process.
- Tune Backupserver to improve throughput.
- Use the new Archive Database feature to do perform object-level restores and consistancy checks
This session will explore the general internals of Backup Server to help you troubleshoot and meet your SLAs to the business. Topics will include general architecture of backup servers and sybmultbuf processes; dump formats; data security/privacy issues; compression; common errors; and the Backup Server API. We will also explore performance and tuning options as well alternative backup strategies such as quiescence & copy and replication. Finally, we will explore the use of the Archive Database Access feature to provide object level recovery capabilities and off-line DBCC.

ASE Cluster Edition from a DBA's perspective
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- install ASE Cluster Edition
- manage ASE Cluster Edition
ASE Cluster Edition brings a number of new commands and management aspects that do not apply to the classic, non-cluster version of ASE. This session covers what you need to know as a ASE DBA in order to work with ASE Cluster Edition in practice.

ASE Cluster Edition: Technical Overview and Futures
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Understand business problems that can be solved using ASE Cluster Edition
- Map business problems to product deployment scenarios
- Understand what product can do and see the demonstration
The presentation will provide introduction to typical business problems addressed by ASE Cluster Edition. It will cover the deployment scenarios that will address the business problems. It will provide overview of different features available in cluster edition and how they will be extended moving forward.

Challenges & Advantages of Bi-Directional/Peer-to-Peer Replication
Audience Job Function: DBA, System Analyst, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- How to overcome technical hurdles to implement bi-directional replication
- Common architectural scenarios and issues
- Competitive implementations
This presentation will describe the requirements and challenges that face organizations that need to implement bi-directional replication as well as the advantages in being able to horizontally scale applications without geographic limits as well as providing near-real time global infrastructure capabilities as well as other common scenarios. Details on true requirements for data ownership, handling conflicts with a focus on "merge" replication vs. conflict exception processing. During the discussion, Sybase's bidirectional capabilities will be compared to competitive implementations.

Configuring ASE Cluster Edition for High Availability
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Understand the different high avaialbility models supported within ASE Cluster Edition
- Understand how to setup logical clusters within ASE Cluster Edition
- Understand how to setup routing within ASE Cluster Edition
Prior to ASE Cluster Edition, customers only had a choice of cold standby, warm stadby, or active / active high availability using the HA option of ASE. This presentation will discuss the different (and improved) high availability architectures that are possible within Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition. Specifically, we will be discussing the N+1, N+N, and N+M high availability models, and how to setup ASE Cluster Edition to obtain each configuration. We'll also discuss dynamically moving back and forth between the availability models, and reconfigure the cluster if the business need should change. Then, we will move on to creating logical clusters based on business need, and finally finish with discussing routing of users to the proper logical cluster. After discussing these issues, we will talk about how to manage failure scenarios, and how to route users in the event that an instance or logical cluster is unavailable.

DBCC Secrets
Audience Job Function: DBA, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- better manage objects in memory and work with corrupted DOL tables and indexes
- understand various methods of sending text to the errorlog and the impact of certain trace flags
- deal with the annoying dbt_keep inconsistency without rebooting your server
This session will highlight some officially undocumented DBCC commands along with how and when to use them. The presentation shows how these commands can be used for specific troubleshooting purposes including: why and how to remove specific data from cache, forcefully release locks, analyze the recovery progress, generate ASE memory dumps, and more. The class provides insight into ASE internals and a better understanding of troubleshooting in ASE.

Deploying Mirror Activator with EMC Storage -- When You Can't Afford to Lose Any Data
Audience Job Function: DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management, Other: Storage Manager
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Understand Mirror Activation unique ability to work with leverage the power of Storage replication while also providing all the advantages of Replication Server
- Learn about the latest features and expanded heterogonous database support Mirror Activator provides.
- Create and manage standby databases for faster failovers, increase data protection with added corruption detection and better network utilization.
This session reviews best practices for implementing a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective data recovery strategy using Mirror Activator and EMC Storage. Mirror Activator is the only Disaster Recovery solution that delivers database failover in minutes with zero data loss to a hot standby database for ASE, Oracle and MS SQL databases. Create and manage standby databases for faster failovers, increase data protection with added corruption detection and better network utilization. Learn about the newest features of Mirror Activator 15 and EMC, included support for Clariion Storage and MS SQL Server.

Evolution of Systems Management at Sybase & Introducing Sybase Control Center
Audience Job Function: DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- describe the Sybase Control Center and understand the drivers behind our re-development of our systems management tooling
- understand the functional areas covered by SCC and how we expect to integrate, scale and extend the architecture to support evolving product requirements
- describe the Sybase Control Center architecture and begin to plan its integration within your enterprise
In the ten plus years since the introduction of Sybase Central as a key component of our systems management architecture we have seen enormous changes to both the global business environment and the corporate infrastructure which continues to leverage Sybase products. During this time we have witnessed the globalization of corporate IT environments due to an explosion in the amount of data under management as well as increased complexity in our software offerings as both stand-alone servers and composite applications comprised of several Sybase technologies. Sybase's current systems management infrastructure is undergoing a significant redevelopment to better enable our customers to effectively manage Sybase resources that are globally distributed and increasingly complex. The vision of the Sybase Control Center is to provide a consistent and integrated set of management tools across all Sybase products. Usability of our systems management tools is of paramount importance and drives our implementation decisions from the beginning of development through customer heuristic testing and finally, in-market evaluation. This presentation will provide an overview of our systems management strategy as well as provide an early look at our availability and performance monitoring deliverables slated to release by year end 2008. We look forward to your feedback and ideas for both this and future releases.

How to avoid the most common performance pitfalls in ASE
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Object Administrator, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- understand when standards are good and when standards are just plain stupid. Many performance issues come from using the defaults. This discussion will explain the defaults.
- learn from many other customers mistakes and not make the same ones. Many of the issues come from not knowing what you can change.
- Identify what are the most important defaults and change them when they should be changed.
Too many systems adhere to standards and take the defaults. This presentation will explain why the "default" may not be so good for performance. Lots of defaults are terrible for system performance. This discussion will focus on the "standard" or "defaults" and why they hurt performance. The discussion will start with each of the following defaults and explain why they where chosen as the "default". They are connect parameters, ANSI SQL defaults, JDBC, ODBC, chained, auto commit, Isolation level, ASE server configuration, ASE server defaults, general configurations, memory defaults, commit frequency, timeouts, blocking timeouts, prepared statements, networking configurations. Each of these configurations will be explained and an alternative value will be determined by usage and not by taking the "default." Each of these can greatly effect overall system performance and an understanding when you should take the "default" and when you should ignore the default is an absolute must. If you are interested in standards but want to make sure you are not blindly following the "pack" this is the discussion for you.

Implementation of Sybase Heterogeneous Replication solution at Goldman Sachs
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- learn tips and tricks of developing and maintaining an extra large heterogeneous replication environment in Goldman Sachs
- learn how to improve heterogeneous replication performance with Dynamic SQL feature
- learn Sybase heterogeneous replication plan / roadmap
a.To present how to develop, set up, maintain, and troubleshoot heterogeneous replication from and to Sybase and non-Sybase DBMSs. b.Let audience grasp Sybase Heterogeneous Replication technical architecture

Little-known aspect and features in recent ASE versions
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- use ASE 15 more efficiently and productively
Recent releases of ASE 15.0 (non-Cluster Edition) introduced various new features and behaviour aspects that may not have received much attention, but will nevertheless be useful to know in many practical situtions. These include changes to query optimization settings as well as various features in a number of areas. This presentation will help you make the most of ASE. Recommend for every DBA or developer. Suitable for all levels.

Performance and benefits of going - from ASE 12.5 to ASE 15.0.
Audience Job Function: DBA
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- know new features in ASE 15.0
- know performance benefits of ASE 15.0
- know how to tune ASE 15.0
Currently we have a 275 gig database which is a mixed mode application with OLTP and DSS queries running on the server. This is a 3-tier application that talk to the back-end database. As the database size grew, the challenges that were faced was to maintain the same performance. Making changes to the database alone did not produce the results that was needed by the business. A complete re- architecture from the hardware/SAN and migrating to ASE 15.0 has provided performance benefits. The same queries from ASE 12.5, are running 3 times faster in ASE 15. Also, a more difficult problem of archiving data in an ASE 12.5 env was resolved by upgrading to 15 and using the instead of triggers. From this session, we will understand the benefits of going to ASE 15 for query responses as well providing archiving options.

Practical Partitioning Tips -- Experiences with ASE 15
Audience Job Function: DBA
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Plan a migration to ASE 15 partitions
- Choose the best partition types for your query mix and the tradeoffs
- Gather data and test using Sybase tools
ASE 15's Semantic Partitions have been shown to improve performance, in many cases dramatically. In addition, Partitions can also reduce maintenance windows if designed properly. However, in reality DBAs are faced with challenges they must solve before reaping these benefits. How do you choose the best partition type for the needs of an application? How can you convince your boss the benefits of a given partition type are worth the cost of getting there. How do you estimate and measure the impact of partitions on performance to prove to your boss you were right. Does partitioning imply a new index design? This presentation will attempt to show some of the trade-offs, pitfalls, realities and real-life experiences of moving to ASE 15's Semantic Partitions.

Preventing data breaches in ASE
Audience Job Function: DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- How do data breaches affect company bottom line?
- Why is database security important?
- What ASE security features can be used to protect against data breaches?
The number of reported data breaches where personal data was lost or stolen increased more than 40 percent year over year in 2007. Direct and indirect costs of dealing with data breaches are increasing significantly. In this environment, is it sufficient to protect the perimeters? Is it sufficient to protect employee laptops and mobile devices - the end-points of data access? What level of priority should be given to protecting the enterprise databases? Databases may contain large volumes of personal data and company intellectual property. A data breach in a sensitive enterprise database can result in a far bigger loss than a stolen laptop containing a few important documents. The level of protection awarded to enterprise databases must be commensurate with the business value of the data. This presentation will focus on the taxonomy of data breaches and will discuss the role databases and database administrators play in securing the company crown jewels. ASE security technologies combined with the right education and security management process can be an effective prescription for your company's data health. When it comes to data breaches, prevention is certainly better than cure.

Reconciling Developer's Desires with DBA's SLA Mandates -- Supporting Relational, Object, and XML Data Models in One Database
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Object Administrator, Consultant, IS/IT Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- use XPATH queries to retrieve data from XML documents
- flatten Java Objects and XML documents into relational data by using Java UDFs and XML built-ins (xmlextract and tablexml)
- create new Java objects and new XML documents from relational data using the ASE built-ins
Sybase ASE supports three data models: the relational data model, the object model and the XML model. ASE enhanced with XPATH query engine capabilities and coupled with a Java Virtual Machine allows the handling (storing, retrieving, querying) of XML documents and Java objects. In this presentation we will show how the data of the different models (relational, object, XML) can coexist in the same database, and how the integration of these data can be simply achieved just by using UDFs and ASE XML built-ins without using any middle-tier mapping tool. With a demonstration we will highlight how this integration approach can make your Java applications, SQL applications and XML based applications share the same repository and the same data.

Scaling with Sybase. Effective Use Of Sybase ASE and Replication Server Technologies
Audience Job Function: DBA, Consultant, IS/IT Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- How Fidelity is using Sybase technology to scale and administer databases efficiently
- How to efficiently support both OLTP and Batch volume in the same productions server
- Practical usage of Sybase ASE and Replication features
1) The objective of the presentation is to discuss our complex environment and how multiple ASE's and Replication Server situated across WAN work in absolute harmony. This presentation is a success story of how a enterprise customer like Fidelity is able to scale efficiently with growth in volumne and data. 2) Discuss how Fidelity handles both Batch and Online traffic without stepping on each others resources. 3) Discuss some of the DBA tricks that we use to manage a multiple critical production database (around 2 TB in total size) that Replicates more than 10 GB of data across WAN each day. 3) Discuss some of the features that Fidelity has implemented like listerer concept to redirect traffic during startup, row level access control / security management, engine binding and grouping, multiple tempdb traffic management, Java & XML in database, Encription, table partition / Innovative Index management

SQL Statement Replication
Audience Job Function: DBA, Object Administrator, Consultant, IS/IT Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class
- Data Replication Technology In General
- Sybase Replication Server
- Log Based vs. Statement Based Replication, Batch Transaction vs. OLTP Transaction
Introduce problems and challenges database replication are facing today, and Sybase Replication Server answers to some of the issues, namely SQL statement replication vs. traditional log based replication. Will talk technical details of SQL Statement replication.

Sybase ASE & EMC Symmetrix - Best Practices for Business Continuance & Disaster Recovery
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Other: Storage Manager
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Understand the basics behind Symmetrix DMX, EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and EMC TimeFinder
- Understand procedures and best practices for creating restartable & consistent database images, as well as failover/failback and log shipping methodologies
- Learn how to implement TimeFinder/Clone with the latest Sybase ASE technology to address emerging business continuance needs and increase nightly batch processing & backup windows
The need to increase nightly batch processing and backup procedure windows has grown out of proportion to the number of hours available to complete these time consuming tasks. EMC TimeFinder combined with Sybase ASE can significantly reduce recovery times and shorten backup windows. SRDF reduces backup and recovery costs and significantly reduces recovery time after a disaster. This presentation will provide a comprehensive set of best practices and procedures when deploying Sybase ASE 15.x with EMC SRDF and/or TimeFinder.

Sybase ASE on IBM System P: Advanced Topics
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Object Administrator, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Successfully migrate Sybase ASE from any hardware platform and OS to AIX or Linux on IBM System P p5+ and p6
- Tune the AIX or Linux for System P Operating System and Advanced Power Virtualization features to achieve maximum performance from Sybase ASE
- Tune Sybase ASE to obtain maximum throughput and response time on very high speed System P processors
During the past two years the number of successful migrations of Sybase ASE V 12.5/15 from Sun, HP, Intel and older IBM platforms has increased dramatically. While basic Sybase ASE and AIX/Linux for Power tuning best practices are by now well know, new challenges have emerged in the field and in the lab owing to very fast p5+/p6 processors and to the adoption of System P virtualization techniques. We will first describe 3 distinct migration goals: consolidation, scale out and speed up and how they influence sizing of ASE and of System P partitions. We will present ASE best practices for Simultaneous Multi-Threading, Shared Processor Lpar, Virtual I/O server, HACMP and the new Power6 architecture. We will address the use of Ramdisk for Tempdb, the preference for raw data devices in AIX, pros and cons of pinning shared memory, and IBM recommended storage layout. We will examine traditional ASE configuration and tuning practices that need to be revisited on very fast System P cores. We will show how to diagnose and treat two main problems of ASE on very fast P processors, underutilization of engines and spinlock contention.

Upgrading and Cloning Production ASE's via "Extreme Mirroring"
Audience Job Function: DBA, Consultant, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Reduce complexity of ASE upgrades
- Easily create ASE instances from a master copy
- Gain increased insight of ASE internals
Extreme mirroring is an undocumented yet supported method to clone entire Sybase ASE instances via mirroring and cleanly separate the instances so that both can be started independently. You can then upgrade the new instance with full failback capabilities or use the process to create DEV,TEST,QA copies. Unlimited copies are possible. Learn how this was recently used in a large financial services company to upgrade ASE instances hosting 1500 databases including replication between systems . This method reduces migration complexity and can typically reduce a migration project plan by a factor of 10.

Using VMware with ASE and ASE Cluster Edition
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, Consultant
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- setup a VMware environment for ASE Cluster Edition
- install and configure ASE Cluster Edition
- perform hardware failure testing
Although few production systems deploy databases on top of virtual machines today, VMs play an important role in minimizing the cost and time of setting up test and development systems. This is especially true with ASE Cluster Edition where products like VMware allow you to explore Cluster Edition on a single computer without organizational red tape and new hardware acquisition. The focus of this session will be a live walk through of the installation and configuration of such an environment. Technical highlights include clustering the virtual machines together through private networks and shared block storage. After building the virtual machines, we will install and configure ASE Cluster Edition, then see how ASE responds to various hardware faults. Where applicable, distinctions between using virtual machines with ASE and ASE Cluster Edition will be highlighted.

What's New in Replication Server 15.1 and Futures
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst, Object Administrator, Consultant, IS/IT Management, Corporate Management
Session Duration: 90 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Realize the value of replicating data not only for Disaster Recovery but for distribution or consolidation for remote DSS or load balancing
- Appreciate the new features of the RS 15.1 release and how these new features add value to the replication solution offered by Replication Server
- Understand how Sybase is making significant improvement to heterogeneous replication solutions with improved performance and manageblity
This session explores the new features of the Replication Server 15.1 release and upcoming releases, with details on the performance, usability, compatibility, and new functionality. The 15.1 release includes a performance feature enhancement, Dynamic SQL, for use in heterogeneous environments. With this feature in 15.1 replication performance is significantly improved for replication environments with Oracle, UDB, and MS SQL Server target database. The 15.1 feature set includes several usability improvements, intended to simplify replication environment configuration and management. These include a simplified interface for replication of stored procedures and improved user commands to allow for easier inspection of in queue transactions. Compatibility with the ASE Shared Disk Cluster release and new ASE datatypes will also be reviewed. Improved performance monitoring and diagnostic of performance issues are highly desired new functionality added in the 15.1 release. Demonstration of the new features and performance diagnostic tools will be included and discussed. Recent releases of heterogeneous replication products will be reviewed including Mirror Activator and Replication Server Options for heterogeneous databases. In addition, the upcoming Replication Server 15.2 release will be previewed, including features that will provide significant performance improvements for batch jobs and OLTP processing, and a new web based management

Why is My Query Slower in ASE 15? Start with Showplan and Plancost.
Audience Job Function: Application Developer, DBA, System Analyst
Session Duration: 60 minutes
Learning Points You Will Take Away from this Class:
- Interpret the 'set showplan on' output is ASE 15
- Compare query plans in ASE 12.5 and ASE 15 by bringing the different showplan output formats to a common denominator
- Use the 'set statistics plancost on' output to identify possible causes for the optimizer to select under-performing query plans
Stumped by a slow query after migrating to ASE 15? Showplan and Plancost should be your first plan of action. Learn how to use these tools to interpret and analyse differences in query plans and determine corrective action. Important differences in Showplan outputs between ASE 12.5x and ASE 15x will be highlighted. You will also learn to leverage Plancost insights to fix problem queries.