Companies can now safeguard sensitive data even from internal personnel such as database administrators, and address regulatory requirements without altering applications or compromising system performance. In fact, while other products on the market are finding that increased security measures have adversely affected performance, customers attest that Sybase ASE maintains its traditional speed and efficiency.

"We have been evaluating encryption technology for the last four years," says Tad Hawkins, vice president, IT Architecture, ACS, Human Capital Management Solutions. "The first solution we implemented could not keep up with our performance requirements. Following an evaluation process, Sybase ASE was selected because it exceeded the service levels we had established as a benchmark. Even under three-times peak loads, there was no performance degradation using enhanced encryption."

"The need to protect data without compromising performance is a major driver for Sybase and this is shown in the latest release of ASE," said Raj Nathan, chief marketing officer, Sybase. "The product continues to gain momentum with hundreds of new customers so far this year, while a significant number of our customers have migrated to ASE 15 to take advantage of the new features."

The benefits of attracting new and existing ASE customers to this release include:

Security

• ASE encryption excels with simplicity and performance. Any column in the database can be encrypted with one command, so a full table or the entire database does not have to be encrypted. Advanced Data protection protects against insider fraud, by using secure keys that even the DBA does not have access to.

• As with earlier versions, ASE encryption does not require changes to applications. Sybase ASE’s unique optimiser takes into account column properties (e.g. whether a column is encrypted or not) when solving a query. This allows highly efficient storage retrieval that minimises the unnecessary data decryption found in lesser solutions.

  Database Development

• Several new features of ASE improve the productivity of the application programmer. ASE 15.0.2 delivers Transact-SQL® user-defined SQL functions (UDFs). SQL UDFs have advantages over other forms of UDFs in that they are much simpler to use. Since these functions are written in SQL, they can be readily incorporated within stored procedures without requiring developers to learn an additional programming language.

• Other ASE enhancements supporting the application developer include updatable views using the "Instead of Trigger" feature, four new statistical functions, and XML table function for better handling of unstructured text.

  Archive Database

• ASE’s Archive Database Access facility, allows DBAs to validate or selectively recover data from a database backups by presenting the backup as if it were an online database.

Performance

• ASE 15.0.2 significantly improves performance for both OLTP applications and decision support systems. New features allow for fast responses when using system-level commands, irrespective of the number of users, and faster performance for creating/loading databases even with tables having triggers and indexes.

Availability
The new enhancements including encryption and security in ASE are available now on over 10 platforms including Windows. For more information, or to place an order, visit www.sybase.com/ASE.

About Sybase, Inc.

Sybase is the largest enterprise software company specialising in managing and mobilising information from the data centre to the point of action. Sybase provides open, cross-platform solutions that securely deliver information anytime, anywhere, enabling customers to create an information edge. The world's most critical data in commerce, communications, finance, government and healthcare runs on Sybase. For more information, visit the Sybase Web site: http://ap.sybase.com.

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Issued on behalf of Sybase

by EBA Communications

For more information, please contact:

Lai-Fun Man, (Sybase) : (852) 2506 8750

(email: lai.fun.man @sybase.com)

Howard Jones/Carla Chan (EBA): (852) 2537 8022

(email: howard.jones@ebacomms.com / Carla.chan@ebacomms.com)