ASA Getting Started
Databases and Applications
This section describes how database applications and the database server work together to manage databases.
Any information system contains the following pieces:
A database Data is stored in a database. In diagrams in the documentation, a database is indicated by a cylinder:
An Adaptive Server Anywhere database is a file, usually with an extension of .db. Adaptive Server Anywhere includes a sample database for you to work with: this is the file asademo.db in your Adaptive Server Anywhere installation directory.
For instructions on how to create a database, see Designing and Building Your Database.
A database server The database server manages the database. No other application addresses the database file directly; they all communicate with the database server.
For instructions on starting database servers, see Connecting Your Application to its Database.
In diagrams in the documentation, a database server is indicated as follows:
Adaptive Server Anywhere provides two versions of its database server: the personal database server and the network database server. In addition to the features of the personal server, the network database server supports client/server communications across a network, while the personal database server can accept connections only from applications running on the same machine. The request-processing engine is identical in both servers.
For more information, see The Adaptive Server Anywhere database server.
A programming interface Applications communicate with the database server using a programming interface. You can use ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, Sybase Open Client, or Embedded SQL.
Many application development tools provide their own programming environment that hides the details of the underlying interface. For example, if you develop an application using Sybase PowerBuilder, you never have to make an ODBC function call. Nevertheless, behind the scenes each of these tools is using one of the programming interfaces.
The programming interface provides a library of function calls for communicating with the database. For ODBC and JDBC, the library is commonly called a driver. The library is typically provided as a shared library on UNIX operating systems or a dynamic link library (DLL) on PC operating systems. The JDBC interface uses the Sybase jConnect driver, which is a zip file of compiled Java classes.
In diagrams in the documentation, a programming interface is indicated as follows:
A client application Client applications use one of the programming interfaces to communicate with the database server.
If you develop an application using a rapid application development (RAD) tool such as Sybase PowerBuilder, you may find that the tool provides its own methods for communicating with database servers, and hides the details of the language interface. Nevertheless, all applications do use one of the supported interfaces.
In diagrams in the documentation, a client application is indicated by the following icon:
