ASA Getting Started
Introduction to Adaptive Server Anywhere
Adaptive Server Anywhere is built around the following technological hallmarks:
Full SQL relational database-management system Adaptive Server Anywhere is a transaction-processing relational database-management system (RDBMS), with full recovery capabilities, online backup, referential integrity actions, stored procedures, triggers, row-level concurrency control, schedules and events, a rich SQL language, and all the features you expect in a full SQL RDBMS.
Economical hardware requirements Adaptive Server Anywhere requires fewer memory and disk resources than other database-management systems.
Easy to use Adaptive Server Anywhere is self-tuning and easy to manage. You can use Adaptive Server Anywhere without the extensive database administration efforts usually associated with relational database-management systems.
Standalone and network use Adaptive Server Anywhere can be used in a standalone manner, for example as an embedded database in a data-centric application, or as a network server in a multi-user client/server or three-tier environment. As an embedded database system, it can be started automatically by an application when required.
High performance While Adaptive Server Anywhere is designed with simple administration and modest resource requirements in mind, it is a scalable, high-performance DBMS. Adaptive Server Anywhere can run on multiple CPUs, has an advanced query optimizer, and provides performance monitoring and tuning tools.
Industry standard interfaces Adaptive Server Anywhere provides a native ODBC 3.5 driver for high performance from ODBC applications, and an OLE DB driver for use from ActiveX Data Object (ADO) programming environments. It has an ADO.NET data provider for Adaptive Server Anywhere and it also comes with Sybase jConnect for JDBC, as well as an iAnywhere JDBC driver, and supports embedded SQL and Sybase Open Client interfaces.
A cross-platform solution Adaptive Server Anywhere can be run on many operating systems, including Windows, Novell NetWare, Sun Solaris, and Linux.
The components available on each platform may differ. For information, see Availability of components.
For more information on supported operating systems for components in SQL Anywhere Studio, see SQL Anywhere Studio Supported Platforms.