To add to some of the earlier comments - ASE 16 has a number of features, in the area of scale up, managing large data sets, ease of use and HA/DR for Business Suite.
In order to ensure that ASE is positioned for the future, significant focus was put in ensuring that ASE scales up with increasing core counts. This required optimization within ASE in the locking/latching algorithms, buffer management, etc. to ensure that concurrent access to internal data structures can be done with minimal or no blocking. Internal benchmarks (OLTP) show scalability on an 80 core machine, with more than 1 million transactions per minute.
In addition to scalability, our focus was also adding capabilities in the area of security/auditing, HANA integration, ease of use and storage optimization. Some of the key features in these areas include:
- Increased Data Availability with Partition Locking
- Index compression
- Full text auditing; Secure Wipe and supporting create/replace for database objects
- The CIS enhancements allow HANA data to be processed within ASE, with query push down from ASE to HANA.
- SCC has also been an area of emphasis for us, with features supporting compression advisor, backup scheduling, etc.
You can consider ASE 16 as the foundational release for upcoming releases to follow soon: supporting high transaction environments, where latency and throughput are critical. Here the focus is on in-memory processing, and taking advantage of memory and data tiering with flash, which will become more integrated with in-memory processing. Technologies like capture and replay will enable ASE users to easily replay production workloads across machines, or versions, making migrations easier. We are also evaluating heat map technology, which will allow users to optimally make use of storage, keeping frequently accessed data on faster devices, and archiving infrequently used data. Security and auditing will continue to be important, and providing more granular auditing and data masking (to allow sensitive data to be masked and shared in an organization), will be areas of focus.
In the next few weeks, we will be updating our official roadmap, which will provide more details on the features in the upcoming releases of ASE.
Ashok Swaminathan, ASE Product Management