SAP ASE offers great performance and value
Updated December 08, 2019
SAP ASE offers great performance and value
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
We use ASE as the foundation for our 401(k) record keeping system. We store approximately 35,000 data elements spread across 24 databases and 2,000 tables. We have approximately 40 TB of data stored in our database. SAP ASE allows us to serve our many clients and business partners concurrently given its high performance and high availability features. Our application is an enterprise application used to service a number of clients both internal and external. SAP ASE is not an enterprise solution within our organization but is used by our department and several others departments for various financial applications. Our application started in 1992 and was originally sold as a licensed product and through merger and acquisition became owned by the bank.
- High availability and reliability.
- High performance.
- Monitoring of threshold based events.
- Security at multiple levels.
- Query plan optimization.
- Lock management.
- Access to HANA.
- Full database encryption - need to utilize external keys vs internal - for better separation of duties.
- History Tables.
- Positive ROI.
- Ease of use with minimal training required to write high performance SQL (assumes a knowledge of SQL already).
- Ease of database administration.
- Sometimes upgrades can be difficult.
- Changing platforms can be difficult (changing say from SPARC to Intel).
- Changing operating systems can be difficult (changing from Solaris to linux).
ASE outperforms MS SQL Server, however, MS SQL Server has some nice tools that make MS SQL Server potentially a far better choice for applications that do not need to full power of ASE. HANA of course blows everything away in terms of performance. What I don't understand there is why SAP didn't make HANA use the same dialect of SQL as ASE. This would have made porting an application from ASE to HANA much easier. Oracle Exadata is more of a whole database machine but is very expensive. And you are tied to the Exadata hardware. We tried to port our application from ASE to Exadata and were making significant progress, but there was significant expense are rewrite involved in that endeavor. There really wasn't enough business value to justify the port and the project was ultimately canceled and we remained on ASE. In my opinion, ASE will provide the lowest total cost of ownership over any of the other platforms and that is what we have seen in our experience.
Do you think SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), legacy delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), legacy's feature set?
Yes
Did SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), legacy live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), legacy go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), legacy again?
Yes
Using SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
300 - Retirement
5 -
DBAs
DBA Mgr
- Creating a financial ledger.
- Creating audit trails of financial changes.
- Making financial data available via the web/mobile devices.
- Reconciliation of financial accounts.
- Using temporal data to give an accurate historical view of the system at any point in time in the past. We call it time travel.
- Account portability for our customers
Evaluating SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Vendor Reputation
Performance was a key concern at the time the product selection was made. We selected this product in 1992. Over the years we have evaluated other replacement products such as Oracle, DB2, HANA, MS-SQL and Informix. Given the cost and complexity to move to another database product, we didn't see the value and have continued to remain on the SAP (Sybase) ASE platform. The platform continues to perform well and is an excellent value for what we paid.
Hindsight of course is 20/20. Back in 1992 when we selected Sybase, the RDBMS market was relatively young. If we could have predicted where the market was going to go, perhaps we would have made a different selection and gone mainstream say with Oracle. But looking back over 27 years, Sybase ASE has always been the performance leader for us. Even though ASE is not an enterprise choice in our organization, we are still able to use it and it has served us well for the past 27 years. I see us continuing to leverage that platform at least until the end of life of our application.
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - We pay for a dedicated support engineer. This person is our liaison into the SAP support team but also is someone that can proactively work with our team to help keep us out of trouble when attempting to use new features or products.
Yes - We reported issues that turned out to be bugs. Yes SAP worked diligently to resolve our issue and release a patch fix for us.
When we switched from process mode to threaded mode, they proactively reviewed our system configuration and settings and made recommendations on the best settings to switch modes. This prevented us from having unnecessary slowdowns and kept the system performing optimally.
Using SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Stored procedures are an easy and efficient way to save queries and query plans.
- T-SQL dialect of SQL is easy to use.
- History tables have to be created manually either through use of a trigger or replication.
- Cross platform migration.
- Cross OS migration.
Yes - SAP has what they call SUP (SAP Unwired Platform) which we do not use. The SUP supports SOAP Web Services and we have standardized around REST so we do not use this.