Introducing SQL Anywhere Studio
The Architecture of Database Applications
Comparing Adaptive Server Anywhere and UltraLite
The appearance of small computing devices such as handheld computers, pagers, and mobile phones creates a demand for a database with even more modest memory requirements than Adaptive Server Anywhere. An obvious option is to produce a trimmed down relational database engine, but our experience has shown that each application and each customer has a distinct set of features that are, for them, essential. Further, such an approach would mean that customers would have to learn two different databases, inevitably different in some ways.
Instead, we developed UltraLite, a novel technology that uses a reference database and your application source code to generate a relational database engine containing only those features of Adaptive Server Anywhere used by your application. Each query is stored with a complete access plan for fast execution; the code needed to execute just those tasks you need are built into your UltraLite database engine. Each UltraLite database engine is different, but many are only a few tens of kilobytes, and can easily be run in a device as small as a pager.
Adaptive Server Anywhere serves as a reference database when you build your UltraLite application, and so your SQL statements, data types, and so on are exactly those of Adaptive Server Anywhere. UltraLite is a deployment technology for Adaptive Server Anywhere, not a different database system. The tasks that each UltraLite database engine is built to perform are carried out in a manner completely compatible with Adaptive Server Anywhere.
UltraLite has built-in MobiLink synchronization technology so that your application is linked into the information network.
UltraLite supports the Palm Computing Platform, Windows CE, and other operating systems used in small devices, such as Java.