SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise

Whats New in ASE 15.7 SP100

2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 3
Introducing ASE 15.7 SP100 ...................................................................................................................... 4
VLDB Performance ..................................................................................................................................... 4
Query Performance ..................................................................................................................................... 6
Operational scalability ................................................................................................................................ 6
Storage Optimization and Recovery ......................................................................................................... 8
Integrated DR solution for Planned Downtime ........................................................................................ 9
Monitoring and Diagnostics ..................................................................................................................... 11
SAP Control Center (SCC) ASEMAP Enhancements ............................................................................ 13
Other Useful Functionality ....................................................................................................................... 14
Summary .................................................................................................................................................... 15

Introduction
In todays fast-paced and fluctuating economy, organizations are striving to provide customers with better
products and services, optimize their operations and fit in the need to act fast within an ever-shortening
maintenance and decision window. Success is measured in the form of better performance combined with
providing the right information at the right time with the right degree of accuracy.
SAP offers a versatile high performance enterprise-class relational database management system that is
well suited for mission-critical, data-intensive environments. It ensures highest operational efficiency and
throughput on a broad range of platforms offering the lowest cost of ownership (TCO) of enterprise-class systems.
Adaptive Server Enterprise from SAP has made tremendous strides forward in improving operational efficiency,
increasing security, exploiting parallelism to provide significant performance gains including enhancements to
provide significant storage optimization and allowing ease of monitoring and development helping not only
database administrators in efficiently managing their database servers but also the CIOs in delivering business
insights and value cost-effectively.
. ASE 15.7 ESD2 had introduced functionality that would help address customer needs including VLDB
performance, security and monitoring:

VLDB Performance
o

Online Utilities

Split / Merge Partitions

Fast Logged BCP

Expanded DB Size

Pre-computed result sets

Hash based update statistics

User Defined Opt Goals

Query Plan Sharing

Enhanced Dump and Load

Concurrent Dump DB and Dump Tran

Async DB initialization

Deferred Table creation

Alter table drop column without data copy

In-row large object compression

Security
o

Granular Permission Control

Predicated Privileges

Support for Encryption of Text/Image/Unitext

Monitoring and diagnostics

o

Show Cached Plan in XML

Compressing Shared Memory Dumps

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7 SP100 is focused on operational scalability along with providing
critical functionality that will enhance the performance and improve monitoring.

Introducing ASE 15.7 SP100

SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7. SP100 is the latest pillar to the ASE 15.x series which was
designed to address the challenges of terabyte-scale operational environments.
In this article, we will look at some of the exciting new functionalities and capabilities that will benefit
customers once they upgrade to ASE 15.7 SP100. Some of the key enhancements that will help ASE 15.7 SP100 in
meeting the following goals for this release are described in the sections below:

Improved VLDB Performance

Improved Operational Scalability

Improved monitoring

VLDB Performance
Create Index Performance Enhancement
It is now possible to issue a create index statement to be executed in a parallel manner resulting in
shorter index creation time. This enhanced parallel create index is disabled by default and is part of the enable
functionality group.
In order to make use of the parallel feature of create index, the following will have to be executed:
1) sp_configure enable functionality group, 1
2) sp_dboption <database_name>, select into, true
And then the following ASE configuration parameters have to be set according to hardware environment:

1) number of worker processes to set to the maximum number of concurrently executing parallel
threads used by all users
2) max parallel degree to be set to the maximum parallel degree used for an individual user but not
higher than number of worker processes
3) max online engines SAP recommends configuring sufficient number of engines when configuring
parallel threads depending on the hardware availability and other workloads. number of worker
processes is typically set higher than number of engines
The basic requirements for ASE to select an enhanced parallel query plan are:
1) The table where the index is created uses a data-only-locked format and is not partitioned or empty.
2) The index is not a non-clustered index
3) The leading column of the index has at least two distinct values.

Create index with Hash Stats

In most database environments, indexes are created to efficiently manage data access leading to
performance improvements during query execution. In general, executing create index on large tables is bound
to have a performance impact especially gathering index statistics. Adaptive Server 15.7 SP100 extends the
support of hash-based statistics gathering to the create index command. Create index command will now have a
with statistics extension to support hash-based stats.
The create index command with hash-based statistics gathering options allow minor index attributes to
be gathered while the index is being created serially or in parallel. The biggest advantage to this functionality is
that users will not have to execute update statistics after the create index command with regards to minor index
attributes and significant performance gain can be expected.

ODBC : Send Client Attributes with next exec

In an application environment, LOB data is handled by the application by executing SQLBulkOperations
and by using ODBC batching protocols like SQLExecute/SQLExecDirect. Since data-at-exect is not supported, LOB
data must be fully materialized before executing these protocols.
A new API called data-at-exec is being provided which will help the application to avoid materializing the
LOB parameters prior to the call to SQLExecute. Instead LOB data will be sent in chunks and the ODBC driver will
convert the data as it is received and hold on to it until all data for the parameter is received at which time it will
be sent to the server.

Query Performance
Enhance star joins
Adaptive Server 15.7 SP100 introduces a new query plan optimization feature called the bloom filter,
which is used to improve join performance. A bloom filter provides early filtering of non-joinable rows before they
would reach the join operator. Bloom filter is only considered when one child of the join operator has to
materialize its derived table before the other child is opened. Bloom filter provides a low-cost approach to
eliminate rows before they participate in a full join algorithm.
In Adaptive Server, bloom filter is implemented for hash join, sort merge join and reformatting based
nested loop join. The bloom filter is only enabled when optimization criteria statement join_bloom_filter is ON.
Optimizer decides to use bloom filter in the final plan if the usage of the bloom filter is estimated to reduce the
total cost of the join.

Operational scalability
Incremental Reorg
In the database world, maintenance windows are very critical to ensure operational scalability. Typically
reorg utility helps in defragmenting the data and improves access performance. Adaptive Server 15.7 SP100
adds a parameter defrag to the reorg command, allowing the user to schedule and resume reorganization while
also allowing concurrent reads or writes on the data being reorganized.
This feature is focused on improving the capabilities of reorg online where reorg could be done without
blocking regular operations. Reorg defrag now splits the reorganization event into multiple transactions one
right after the other compared with the traditional reorg which reorganizes the entire table in a single transaction.
This allows the user to specify a time interval to reorganize the data and resume the process at a later time until
completion. The advantage to this is the ability to keep the maintenance window small and improve productivity
thereby increasing data availability and reducing data disruption to business operations. Here is an example of
using the defrag command where we will be performing incremental reorg for 3 minutes
reorg DEFRAG demotable with TIME=00:03
go

Ability to Create Index Online

It is becoming more and more important for businesses to have high data availability. Traditionally,
creating an index on a large data has been known to cause a significant performance problem in terms of data
availability. Adaptive Server 15.7 SP100 includes the create index ... online parameter providing the ability to
create index online where index creation will not block the data availability. All parameters associated with the
existing create index command will work the same with the online option except the sorted_data parameter
which creates index on the existing data layer.

Support for Parallel Index Update

As the data size increases, there is an impact on the performance of loading of data into the tables. This
feature has been implemented with the goal to improve the data load performance when the target table has
multiple indices defined on it and the mass data load is accomplished by an insert statement.

Insert-Select Performance
Performance has played a very important role for ASE in comparison with competition. The performance
improvements that has been addressed in ASE 15.7 SP100 with regards to massive data insert during the loading
process has solidified the fact that ASE is continuously improving in the area of performance. InsertSelect
performance is improved by applying bulk insert mode. ASE 15.7 SP100 introduces a new optimizer criteria
INS_BY_BULK to the bulk insert mode and this can be applied at a system, session and individual query level.
One of the advantages of using this approach is that the user applications do not have to be changed in order to
use this feature. An additional benefit that comes for free as part of this enhancement is the improvement to
performance of statements like Select Into and worktable population. Thus, this optimization helps to improve
performance during massive loads into a table.

Storage Optimization and Recovery

Shrink database / drop devices
ASE 15.7 SP100 introduces the concept of shrinking the database which is a sought-after functionality in
the customer base. This feature allows freeing of unused space for reuse and/or deletion. ASE removes the
associated physical storage from the database without losing the data located on that storage. ASE moves the
data on the portion of the database to be shrunk to a new location before attempting to remove the space from
the database. Once the portions to be removed are empty, their physical storage will be replaced by references to
a null device thus making the freed space available for reuse. ASE uses the alter database command to shrink
the database. Here is an example of shrinking a database by removing a database device from the database:
alter database demoDB OFF dbdev2
The OFF clause specifies the device name(s) from which space is to be released. It cannot appear in a command
together with either the ON or LOG ON clauses.

Incremental dump database

One of the responsibilities of a DBA is to ensure that the database is backed up and the latest dumps are
available in case there is a need to recover from a crash or a similar situation. ASE 15.7 SP100 has included some
enhancements to the dump and load commands that will keep the DBAs with a secure feeling about their database
environment. The dump database command now allows a cumulative backup to be performed where one can
dump only those database changes since the last full database dump. Another enhancement to the backup
functionality is the ability to dump one database and load it into another database using the dump history file. It
should be noted that the Tivoli Storage Manager is now fully integrated with the dump history file. A new utility
called sybdumptran helps in generating a final transaction log dump from log devices from outside of ASE in case
of a catastrophic failure. These enhancements bring several advantages like reducing the amount of time needed
for a full backup, speeding up recovery time, improving backup performance etc.

Enhanced Dump and Load

Adaptive Server 15.7 SP100 has now included a new standalone utility called restore, which gives the
ability to restore a database from the database and transaction log dumps. In order to support this utility, the
load database and the load transaction commands have been enhanced with new options. With the new changes,
it is now possible to apply source database attributes to the target database. It is essential that both the target
and the source database have the same attributes to ensure that the restored database is exactly as it was.

Restore Command Line Tool

The requirement is to have a stand-alone utility to restore an ASE database to the time of failure from the most
current full database backup dump files. In order to use the utility, the ASE server must be up, the master
database is available, source database is connected to the ASE server in a recovered state or unrecovered state
and the log segment of the source database should be available for dumping and then loading back the last
transaction logs that have not been dumped. Ideally the utility should enable user to restore from the log segment
of the database for the transactions not backed up to the dump files in case of data disk crashes. The utility should
provide a simple command line interface as well as a silenced parameterized interface.

Integrated DR solution for Planned Downtime

Support of writetext command to replicate LOB changes
If a database had tables with LOB columns, the process of marking the database for replication included a
step where the database server maintained a storage area that will be updated with the information about the offrow columns or LOB columns. When the shrinkdb operation moves information around to accommodate the
reduction in physical storage, it needs a way to locate the data row pointing to it prior to the shrink operation.
Earlier, only when replication is enabled, the row-id pointing to the home data row gets updated with the new
page number. With this release, support has been added to maintain the information of the LOB columns so that
the operations like shrinkdb will not affect the link to the home data row.

Provide soft quiesce functionality

In a typical HA/DR environment, there will be two or more servers one of which will be the primary where all the
transaction processing occurs while the rest will serve as warm standby to the primary. An HA/DR configuration
offers a seamless planned application failover from primary to standby.
A new functionality called Soft Quiesce is introduced in this release which will ensure that the transaction
activities are terminated in a proper sequence on the primary, followed by the draining of transaction logs of the
HADR databases by the replication subsystem in case of a disaster. In order to support a seamless planned
failover, it is essential to stop transaction processing activities on HADR databases on the primary in an orderly way
so that no further changes can occur in the transaction logs. This is the quiesce state of the log. At this point, the
replication agent thread using the LOG DRAIN mechanism drains the transaction log. Once the draining is
complete, the inactive primary is ready for failover.

MRP support for multiple scanners

The Adaptive Server monitoring tables have been enhanced to support multiple scanner threads for RepAgent.
Enabling multiple scanner threads for RepAgent provides access to available replication paths and improved
replication performance. It also helps the Adaptive Server monitoring tables to provide information about
RepAgent scanner task performance. The monitoring table monRepSenders now has three columns that have
beed added to provide compatibility with the single task model. The three columns that have been added are:
NumberOfTruncPointRequested
NumberOfTruncPointMoved
AvgTruncPointInterval
monRepScanners
The NumberOfTruncPointRequested and NumberOfTruncPointMoved columns are populated when the single task
scanning of a log model is used. When the Multiple Replication Paths (MRP) model is used, these columns values
are 0.

Monitoring and Diagnostics

Server-wide DML metrics
With the increased requirement for better performance, there is a need for being able to provide metrics on a
number of operations reflecting two different areas:
1) Application activities such as committed and rolled back transactions, select, update, insert, delete or
merge queries.
2) Utilization of server resources such as table scans, index scans, temporary and work tables, user log
cache activities, I/O activities such as physical reads and writes and logical reads.
These metrics help the end-user get a detailed understanding of the activity that has occurred as well as those that
are occurring currently on ASE.

Elapsed time monitoring

Although it is possible to obtain detailed information for how much time ASE is spending waiting for events such as
locks, I/O operations or a wide range of internal events, there was no visibility into the total time taken by the
server in performing the actual work to get this information. The following execution categories have been
enhanced to track the number of times the operation has been performed and the total amount of time spent
performing operations :
-

Query execution

Sorting

Query compilation

Support built-in grouping of SQL Statements

Adaptive Server 15.7 SP100 includes the show_condensed_text function, which gives the ability to
aggregate monitoring data for multiple statements in the statement cache which, although they are syntactically
distinct (having individual comments or differences in their text format), represent semantically identical queries.
This capability allows the function to aggregate the values from the MDA table monCachedStatement into a single
row in the query result. The information thus obtained is helpful when making a decision on which statements to
retain in the cache.
The MDA table monCachedStatement stores detailed monitoring information about the statement cache,
including, but not limited to:
Information about resources used during the previous executions of a statement,

 How frequently a statement is executed

The settings in effect for a particular plan,
The number of concurrent uses of a statement

Query Plan and Execution metrics output in HTML format

In Adaptive Server versions 15.7 SP100 it is possible to have a graphical query plan generated in HTML
format for viewing in a Web browser. Earlier, one method of performing analysis of complex queries was to
evaluate text based output provided by the set showplan and set statistics {time | IO} commands. The HTML
representations are displayed on a single page and the description of the query plans are more intuitive and
clearer.

Access in-use plans through show_cached_planIin_xml()

ASE 15.7 ESD#2 introduced a built-in function to provide access to the query plans for cached statements
in XML format. However, there was a restriction that prevented it from returning the plans for query plans that
were in use at the time that the function was executed. With Adaptive Server versions 15.7 SP100 the restriction
has been removed and the plans for query plans will now be returned.

Enhance monSpinlockActivity MDA Table

The MDA table monSpinlockActivity captures information on the spinlocks defined in the running server.
The enhancement that is being done to the MDA table monSpinlockActivity in ASE 15.7 SP100 introduces a new
column that will contain a slot ID associated with each spinlock. The new column is called SpinlockSlotID in order
to indicate the value of the column that is derived from the Object Pool slot in which the spinlock memory is
allocated and is not a persistent property of the spinlock itself. This provides a detailed analysis of the usage of
individual spinlocks in the server.

SAP Control Center (SCC) ASEMAP Enhancements

SCC has included full support for all the important ASE 15.7 SP100 features thus making it easier
for the end users. Here are a few features for which SCC extends support in ASE 15.7 SP100:
-

Cumulative Dump and Load

o

SCC now supports the functionality of taking incremental database dumps as well as loading
these incremental dumps into a database.

Enhancements to Dump and Load

o

SCC is now being fortified with more enhancements to the dump and load commands.

It is possible to generate the DDLs required to create a target database based on the
information of the source database. This is obtained from the dump history file that gets
recorded when dump database and dump tran commands are executed.

As an extension, SCC can also generate the statements for loading a database which is
done by reading the dump history file and generate the load sequence.

Yet another enhancement is the ability to perform load database from a point in time. SCC
also allows users to use multiple stripes when dump and load a database.

Shrink Database
o SCC users can now determine if it is indeed necessary to execute the shrink database
command based on the space utilization information for the database.

Incremental Reorg
o SCC now provides the ability to execute reorg operations on a table, index and partitions.
Using a wizard, it is possible to run reorg from the context menu of a database. These
wizards covers all the reorg options available in ASE to perform defragmentation.

Create Index Online

o SAP control center allows a user to mark an index as online, in the index creation wizard,
indicating that data is not to be blocked while the index is being created.

Support for Split/Merge/Move Partitions

o Split/Merge/Move partitions is a feature introduced in ASE 15.7 ESD#2. It is now possible to
execute split/merge/move partitions through SCC starting ASE 15.7 SP100. SCC supports the
ability to split a single data partition into multiple partitions, merge two data partitions into
one partition and move one partition from one segment to another.

Other Useful Functionality

ODATA (Open Data Protocol) Support
OData (Open Data Protocol) enables data services over RESTful HTTP. It provides the ability to
perform operations through URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers) to access and modify information. The Adaptive
Server OData Server consists of : the OData Producer and an HTTP server.
a) OData Producer a Java Servlet that uses the JDBC API to connect to an Adaptive Server. The OData Producer
processes OData requests and responses and interfaces with the database.
b) An HTTP server - that handles OData requests from web clients the OData server uses the Jetty WebServer as
its HTTP server. This embedded HTTP server also acts as a Java Servlet container, which is required to host the
OData Producer.
Instead of using the embedded HTTP server, it is possible to use a custom HTTP server to handle OData requests,
as long as the customers solution can also host Java servlets. For example, it is possible to set up an IIS or Apache
server to forward requests to a Tomcat server.
OData client requests are sent to an HTTP server through URIs and are processed by the OData Producer, which
then interfaces with the database server to issue database requests and retrieve content for the OData responses.
The OData schema for each client is based on the client's database connection permissions. Clients are not able to
view or modify database objects that they do not have permission to view.

Summary
Sybase ASE 15.7 SP100 is a recent addition to SAP ASE 15.7 with significant improvements to VLDB performance,
Operational Scalability, reliability using HA/DR solution and monitoring and diagnostics.
In the database world, increased data volume translates into various issues like operational scalability, decreased
performance and crunch in storage. SAP Sybase ASE 15.7 SP100 has introduced several key features which help
solve the issues that surround the increased data volume in an organization. From redistributing data for
maintaining partitioned data effectively to improving data availability during maintenance windows in a production
environment, ASE 15.7 SP100 has successfully enhanced the operational scalability experience for customers. In
the query processing area, ASE 15.7 SP100 introduces creation of index online, support for parallel index updates
and tremendous improvement in the area of insert-select performance supporting the load of massive data into
tables. Shrinkdb which is a storage saving feature and HA/DR for planned downtime in terms of reliability would
be well received by both new and current customers alike. Great enhancements made in the area of monitoring
and diagnostics would be very helpful for customers to monitor and communicate diagnostics information with
SAP.
SAP ASE 15.7 SP100 is available to customers as of May 2013.

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