Upcoming SQL Anywhere Sets Sights On Web Services Support

iAnywhere, which leads the field in tiny, embeddable databases, plans to update its offering later this year with support for key Web services standards and new ties to Microsoft's .Net world.

The next release of iAnywhere's SQL Anywhere Studio, code-named Banff, will add support for SOAP, WSDL and other key Web services standards, Chris Kleisath, director of engineering, told CRN on Monday.

"The marketing cloud hanging over Web services for the past year is starting to coalesce, and some real standards are starting to emerge around XML," Kleisath said.

Being able to serve up data to Web services and to receive it that way will help integrators tie mobile devices running SQL Anywhere into legacy landlocked-systems, observers said.

"Anything that improves the tools for working with legacy systems is helpful. Typically, in the mobile device realm, people want to add those devices to existing systems," said Kirk Wolfe, president of Enterprise Mobility, a Cincinnati-based integrator specializing in mobile applications.

SQL Anywhere will support WSDL to describe Web services, and WSDL support will enable users to call database functionality from a Web interface rather than having to connect in a traditional client-server link using JDBC or ODBC connection types, Kleisath said.

Users can send XML requests in, and the database will shoot back XML data, he said.

"Two things are happening with XML in databases," Kleisath said. "First, the database will be able to accept XML and from that do something inside the database server to import XML documents and 'shred' them into its component parts ... we'll support that. Secondly, we'll be able to export XML data."

Support for XML data is a hot button among all the database vendors going forward, with IBM, Oracle and Microsoft also promising better native XML support in future editions of their respective databases.

Additionally, the company will continue to support a wide range of toolsets and add enhanced support for Microsoft's emerging .Net platform in the form of an ADO .Net driver to enable developers using Visual Studio.Net to access SQL Anywhere data, Kleisath noted. iAnywhere already supports Java, meaning developers can write logic and procedures in the Java language and load them into the database.

On the performance side, the company will add technology, tentatively called an Index Wizard, to analyze the database structure and suggest how to best index the data for certain applications, Kleisath said. "Up until this point, developers and DBAs have had to use intuition to figure out which index will work and had to do a lot of manual work to optimize query plans. This tool runs as your applications run and stores away workload analyses and makes suggestions based on that," he noted.

SQL Anywhere competes in a number of realms. Researcher Gartner says it leads the market among small-footprint databases embedded in third-party applications and devices. In that arena it competes mostly with home-grown systems. As it moves up into larger devices like laptops, it sees more competition from companies like Oracle and Microsoft.

Enterprise Mobility's Wolfe said his company's options were SQL Anywhere or device-specific languages and tools. "On the Palm we would use PDBs [Palm Databases] and a conduit to the backend database. For [Microsoft-based] PocketPC devices you'd use ADO [for Windows] CE, but that's for very targeted, low-volume data needs ... but for high-volume needs, you step up to SQL Anywhere," Wolfe said.

Banff is slated to go to beta in late April and to be generally available this summer, the company said. iAnywhere is owned by Sybase, Dublin, Calif.