ASA Getting Started
Databases and Applications
How the pieces fit together
You can use Adaptive Server Anywhere to build a complete application and database on a single computer. In the simplest arrangement, this is a standalone application or personal application: it is self-contained with no connection to other databases. In this case, the database server and the database can be started by the client application, and it is common to refer to the database as an embedded database: as far as the end user is concerned, the database is a part of the application.
Standalone applications have the following architecture, with a client application connecting through a programming interface to a database server running on the same machine:
The Adaptive Server Anywhere personal database server is generally used for standalone applications, although you can also use applications on the same machine as the network server.