News

Sybase boosts place in real-time world

• By Alan R. Earls
• May 6, 2004

Sybase Inc. has started shipping its Real Time Data Services (RTDS) middleware offering, described as a complete solution for real-time enterprise information management. Sybase RTDS can proactively publish and subscribe data from heterogeneous enterprise databases to messaging infrastructures, officials said.

According to Sybase, RTDS can combine heterogeneous data movement and real-time messaging in an integrated, open standards-based solution, eliminating the need for custom coding and lowering TCO. The offering is said to require no custom coding, promises low operations impact, and supports multiple databases such as Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

"Organizations are seeking ways to make real-time event data available, but to date the solutions have been costly, intrusive and custom coded," said IDC research analyst Carl Olofson. "Solutions that make the database a proactive participant in the information chain and can handle the complexities of heterogeneous data centers will be very attractive," he noted. Moreover, "solutions that can simplify the interfaces between proactive databases and messaging systems should eliminate the need to write intrusive polling applications for event notifications," Olofson said.

According to Haridas Nair, Sybase's director of marketing, organizations increasingly need information as it happens. "When we work with a bank that handles mortgage applications, they need to know downstream, right away, when a loan closes," he said. What's more, organizations can no longer afford to lose access to data when a batch process is using it.

Typically, homegrown solutions have involved doing batch runs more frequently or writing some kind of polling program. But, said Nair, the RTDS technology can eliminate that complexity by "non-intrusively capturing data."

"We can read database logs and then grab data and deliver it to a message bus," he explained. In addition, Nair noted that the latest version of the Sybase ASE relational database management system has also been enhanced with the same functionality, permitting direct writing to Java Messaging Services.

Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said the RTDS product "definitely has value, especially for customers looking to make data available in real time."

According to Yuhanna, most organizations don't have one database vendor -- they may have several. And the fact that Sybase RTDS can help span those databases is very valuable.

"Although Sybase long ago lost the DBMS battle to the big three -- Oracle, IBM and Microsoft -- with this and their strong and mature replication product, they have a real edge over those vendors," said Yuhanna. Thus, he said, customers will likely turn to Sybase more and more for help with integration issues. "This extends their boundaries in support of real time and data sharing," he added.