On Wednesday, October 01, 1997 9:48 AM, Marc Nicholas [SMTP:marc@hippocampus.net] wrote:

My first question would be: when Sybase? :-)

(I'm just plain greedy...)

-marc

Marc Nicholas - Hippocampus OSD Inc. 416 979 9000 - fax: 416 979 8223 - http://www.hippocampus.net 125 John St. - Suite #100 - Toronto - Ontario - M5V 2E2 - CANADA "Inter/Intra/Extra[net] consulting, services, hardware and software

sales"

There is no technical reason that we currently know of that would prevent any other database from making similar use of a filer for storing its datastores. Care still needs to be taken with configuration as you would any time you are splitting the files of a particular application across platforms, but putting all the datastores for a particular database instance on the filer for any given RDBMS should work fine.

As has already been mentioned, we here at Network Appliance talk to our Sybase database over NFS with stores on the filer and have done so for quite some time without problems. It is rumored that Sybase pulled back from allowing NFS access to its data but I have not been able to confirm this yet. We can say (empiracally at least) that it works.

The real answer to your question is that we have had some introductory discussions with Sybase and will continue to work with them to gain their certification. You can be of assistance in this by mentioning to your Sybase representatives of your interest in getting your Sybase stores onto the filer. This is precisely how the intial interest was generated at Oracle when a very large Oracle customer indicated that Oracle really should support storage on a filer. I believe that similar interest expressed to Sybase will generate similar support.

At the very least, if you have a test Sybase environment, I would give it a try. You will not be able to operate in "raw" Sybase mode, of course, but should still see similar if not increased performance over the network.

Bruce Clarke