ASA SQL User's Guide
  Monitoring and Improving Performance
    Top performance tips

Upgrade to take advantage of new features

Adaptive Server Anywhere is constantly being evaluated and enhanced in terms of performance features and usability. With each subsequent release, you can take advantage of new features and behavior changes that will help you optimize performance.

While you can simply run a database created with an older version of Adaptive Server Anywhere on a newer release, many of the new features are only available if the database is upgraded. Running the Upgrade utility adds and modifies system tables, system procedures and database options to upgrade a database from an older version of Adaptive Server Anywhere to a newer version.