Likewise, from the prehistory of downsizing mainframe applications to client/server, to the latest forays into electronic commerce, Sybase has been an old--and if not dear, then at least reliable--friend. I've recommended and used Sybase's database management products for years. Unfortunately for Sybase, its sagging fortune appears to be a carbuncle.

In the mid-1980s, the company was very successful--most notably with the denizens of Wall Street, where the prototypical early adopters of any type of enterprise software reside. Brokerages' trading systems validated the concept of "real-world, high-volume, networked, secure, distributed client/server" for mainstream corporate America. Parenthetically, Wall Street also jump-started the CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) market.

What Goes Up... The linchpin to these applications was the data, not the interface--and certainly not the network. Wall Street's ability to capture transactions and perform complex investigations by crunching data was what made mainframe downsizing work. By providing the engine to enable this, Sybase was an important part of the success of those early systems.

Sybase succeeded because it had the best database engine around. It also introduced two key technologies: multithreading and stored procedures. These aren't a big deal today, but back then they were cutting edge. These technologies also were crucial to the reasoning behind Microsoft's decision to select Sybase as the provider of OS/2's SQLServer (yes, it happened on OS/2 first). The rest is history--the multithreaded back-end database became the de facto model for the next decade.

...Must Come Down Sadly though, Sybase rested on its product laurels. For instance, its product has lagged its competitors in terms of core functionality. The company recently went through a major release from version 10 to 11 without a single appreciable enhancement to its core language--Transact SQL. Its progeny--Microsoft SQLServer--using the same code base, introduced several enhancements to its version of SQL. Microsoft even added truly dynamic SQL, giving the programmer the ability to use application algorithms, formulate SQL statements on the fly and submit them to an engine that will compile and execute them.

In contrast, Sybase's counterpart product forces the programmer to declare all columns, tables and where clauses at compile time. Even the most basic SQL statement, "the select," has been enhanced by Microsoft to support embedded case statements. This enhancement, though syntactically minor, is useful for mapping data types or applying categorizations. Sybase didn't support this feature until late 1997 with release 11.5.

And data mapping isn't the only extension missing from "the select" in Sybase's version. The parts explosion problem is a difficult one to express in SQL--a part contains other parts, which in turn, contain other parts. Expressing a recursive hierarchy has broad applications. Competitor Oracle added support for recursive hierarchies to make the database programmer's life easier, and though it was proprietary support, it was support all the same. But still, there is nothing from Sybase.