Adaptive Server Enterprise
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Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is Sybase Corporation's flagship relational database management system product.
ASE is a direct descendant of Sybase SQL Server as it was a change in name only starting from version 11.5 in 1996. In 1998, ASE 11.9.2 was rolled out with support for row-level locking and distributed joins and improved SMP performance. ASE 12.0 was released in 1999 providing support for Java, high availability and distributed transaction management. In 2001, ASE 12.5 was released providing features such as dynamic memory allocation and support for XML and SSL among others. Support of an EJB container within the database server along with efficient in-memory connections to the database engine, suggests an object oriented access to the relational data.
In September 2005, Sybase released ASE 15. It includes a rewritten query optimizer that is supposed to increase performance over the traditional optimizer, and support for partitioning table rows in a database across individual disk devices to reduce contention and increase the speed at which the data can be accessed, and "virtual columns" which are computed only when required. Other changes that didn't make it to the initial release but are expected soon are support for column-level encryption, and the ability to mount a database dump as a "virtual database" and extract only the information required. See the online documentation for more details.
It is rumoured that the version number was bumped to 15 because 13 is considered unlucky in Europe, the United States and other "Western" countries, and 14 is considered unlucky in China.